


In The Line of Duty

by sidana



Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 14:19:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 49,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16477178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidana/pseuds/sidana
Summary: A slight AU where Officer Bates was not killed by Van Anders at the end of 'Cerulean Sins'. Bates then discovers that the price for surviving can come at a very high cost.





	1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer- not my characters, not my universe, I'll put everyone back when I'm done playing with them. 

So this is another story originally posted at Pomme de Sang somewhere in the 2005-08 range. It started out as a one shot, and then morphed into a longer plot bunny. First, I'm a sucker for throwing a character into a situation where they're forced to change a whole bunch of assumptions about themselves and their world and seeing what happens. And second, I saw it as a challenge to write a character who was very different from me and who had what I felt were some pretty unlikeable moment and still have them seem sympathetic. 

The story was based on what we knew about werewolf culture at the time. There are some pretty dark aspects of it, and, while I don't like to give away spoilers via warnings, there's some pretty squicky stuff in Chapter 14 or so. I also filled in what were a few blanks at the time, and there may be contradictions that came out in later books. 

**********

In the Line of Duty- Chapter One

"Any changes from yesterday?" the nurse asked Officer Luke Bates as she eyeballed the assorted machines and lines he was hooked up to. Her name was Carly, and he appreciated that she wasn't one of those nurses who tried to hard to be overly cheerful around those in pain.

"I guess I'm feeling slightly less crappy. Hard to tell with the drugs. But I guess it's a good sign I'm no longer quite so doped up and that I can now speak full sentences. So what's the plan of action for the day?"

"Right now, I'm here to do a blood draw from you. You seem to be running something of a fever, and we want to see if that fever is caused by some sort of infection."

He bet one particular infection was of special interest. Ever since he had woken up, he had been going over what he remembered from that lecture on saliva and bloodborne pathogens at the police academy. He had never gotten the lycanthropy vaccine. It had been recommended for law enforcement officers and first responders, but had never been required. And for some reason, insurance would never cover it either, and it was an expensive vaccine. Five or six hundred dollars, and every time he had though about getting it, he had needed the money for something else. His car would fail inspection or his homeowner's insurance would come due.

"Then later on this morning, Dr. Weiler from orthopedics is going to come by, and talk about treatment options for rebuilding your knee and wrist. Then you're scheduled for a neurology consult later on this afternoon. If there are going to be those kinds of problems, it's better to know about and start treatment on them now rather than later."

Because they were still worried about brain damage. His heart had stopped three times in the operating room. At one point, someone had even given his friends the message that he had died in there. Now, they wanted to know just how much was left of him. He thought he could remember everything important, but then if something improtant was missing, it wasn't like he'd be able to realize that.

"Thanks for not blowing smoke up my ass, Carly." he said.

"I bet you say that to all the nurses." she said.

"Only the girls. The guys, I threaten a bit if they go near my ass. Not that I'm in shape to even swat a fly right now."

"You'll make it back. Swat team and all." she said as she drew a blood sample from his somewhat less damaged arm. He wondered just how much of it was his blood, and how many of the red cells had started out their lives in someone else's body. Considering how much he had bled out, very little of it was probably originally his.

"Careful, you're sounding a little too optimistic."

She just smiled at him as she left his room. It was supposed to be a double room, but none of the other officers would hear of him being forced to share unless every other room in the hospital was full. So the spare bed in the room went to his fiancee Jenn, who had slept over in it the first couple of days after he had been brought in. She had gone home for a couple hours to change clothes and take care of some other things. Even though he loved her more than anything he had ever loved in his life, he was glad she was gone for a little while. It was the first time since the incident that he had had a chance to just be left alone for a little while. No one to stare at the police officer that survived getting clawed up by an insane werewolf serial killer.

He grabbed the television remote, and started flipping through the channels. Thankfully, the hospital had at least a couple of cable channels, and he wasn't left watching the evil that was Katie Couric. Not that he even really liked watching tv in general all that much. Unless it was football or basketball, he'd almost always rather be doing something active instead of just watching others wander around the screen. He finally located a travel show that seemed like it would be tolerable, and put the remote back down.

He dozed off for a time, and then was awoken by a knock at the door.

"Hi, Officer Bates. I'm Officer Theo Mortensen, and I'm a representative from your St. Louis Police Officers' Union. We wanted to see how you were doing today."

"C'mon in. Not like I'm in the middle of something too exciting here." he sighed, turning off the tv set. The other officer walked into his room. Luke had never really had much interest in union business. All it seemed like was some layer of bureaucracy- people pushing around papers instead of being out doing something useful.

"Nice pepper and tomato plants over by the television." The officer eyed what was turning into Luke's in-room garden.

"People wanted to bring something in for the room, but I don't really like flowers. They make me feel too much like I'm at my own funeral. Jenn suggested the vegetables instead. New life instead of dying buds."

"I'm here to let you know your brothers in law enforcement will do whatever they can to assist you in your recovery." Mortensen seemed genuine, and it seemed like countless other officers had held vigil for him when he had first been rushed to the hospital. He had been touched to learn how much they cared.

"Thanks. I really do appreciate everything both the union and the brothers have done for me."

"I want to let you know we've had some fights with the city before about officers getting rushed back to duty before they had a chance to recover. If you do feel like you're getting pressured to come back before you're ready, get in touch with the union, and let us know. You were seriously injured in the line of duty and in service to the community. You deserve to have a chance to fully heal."

"Thanks. I do appreciate the union's support." Might as well be nice to the paper pusher. He had heard a story or two in that area.

"And also, I want to remind you that under the most recent collective bargaining agreement, if you have become infected with the lycanthropy virus in the line of duty, then you are elgible for a full and immediate injury pension from the SLPD. Just in case the worst case scenario plays itself out."

"Thanks."

"Now I've got to go here. Take care of yourself, and work on getting well again." Mortensen walked back out the door.

Worst case scenario. So if he wasn't dead, then just what was the worst case? Was it really getting furry and kicked off the police force? But what if that bastard Van Anders had clawed at his face and left him blind? If they didn't get his intestines to heal up right and he never managed to achieve a seperation from Mister Colostomy Bag? Or if the angle of the claws had been just a little different and the bastard had taken a chunk out of his spinal cord? Not that he had met many weres, but at least none of them had been cripples.

In order to get away from his own thoughts, he turned the tv back on, managing to find something moderately distracting until the orthopedic surgeon showed up to talk about how he was going to undo the damage to Luke's leg. A good guy, Dr. Weiler. They had even managed to make each other laugh after a string of jokes about turning Luke into the Six Million Dollar Man and rebuilding him stronger than ever. Then came his glorious lunch. After everything that had happened, he had to say he appreciated 7-Up in a way he had never imagined. Being allowed to drink that and carefully slurp down the green jello made him feel just a little bit closer to normal. Just as he was finishing the jello and wondering if they would give him any more, there was another knock on the door.

"Who's there?"

"Anita Blake. I want to talk to you."

"Okay, come on in. I had hope against hope that it was someone with seconds on the jello."

She chuckled as she walked in the door. He knew there were other police that had a problem with Blake. They said she was a civilian, wasn't tough enough to sign up to walk their walk. But she was someone who had pulled the department's asses out of the fire, had given them information no one else could. And had been the first one through the door in some seriously high level surpenatural criminal shit. She may not be police, but she had more than earned his respect.

"Thanks for letting me come in. I wasn't sure you'd want to talk to me. I feel like I should have reviewed the materials that got brought back from Quantico's preternatural creatures training, not just assumed that the FBI knew what they were talking about just because they were the FBI."

"What do you mean?"

"Van Anders' ability to only shift parts of his body, to push his claws out while the rest of him remained human. I knew that some alpha lycanthropes were capable of that. I assumed the FBI's experts knew that too and let you know what Van Anders was capable."

"You know it's kind of neat to have our local expert know more than the know-it-all feds who think us local yokels don't know shit." he smiled a little. "As for not wanting to talk to you, it's not like you were the guy who tried to kill me. No blame from me to you; I'm only blaming Van Anders for the death and maiming."

"Good. That makes the second thing I need to say to you a little bit easier. I don't know if you've had the blood test come back yet, but I know the odds when someone gets as badly cut up by a werewolf as you did. If it's positive, I've got some contacts with the local werewolf pack. A lot of them manage to lead pretty normal lives, unlike what you'd get if you signed yourself into a halfway house."

"It was one of them who did this to me." The drugs must be wearing off again. He could actually feel a bit of anger through the numbness.

"Not anyone in the pack. In fact, there were members of it that risked their lives to help me tack down and execute Van Anders. They're different."

"You're the preternatural expert." he said, anger moving on to bitterness. He liked being a beat cop. If he had ever wanted to run with the weird, he would have gotten himself assigned to RPIT.

"I am." she said. It sounded like he had struck a nerve. "Look, if the test comes back positive, and you want to talk about it to someone, call me, and I'll get you in touch. Here's my business card. Home phone number and my personal cell number are written on the back."

Before he could say anything more to her, she turned and walked out the door. He looked at where she had left her business card on the table, hoping and praying he could just throw it away later.

An hour later, Carly was back in the room to check on him.

"The neurologist is running late. He should be here in another fifteen minutes or so." she said.

"Thanks. Find anything in my blood test from this morning."

"A doctor will be in to talk to you about the results later."

"So there is something in the results to talk about?"

"A physician is supposed to discuss that with you." she said. He could tell she knew already, but she wasn't allowed to talk about it with him. Which could only mean one thing.

"What, right about the same time one of the orderlies shows up with the shackles?"

"It's not like that..."

"Then what? Well I guess I'm about to find out. And since you're not allowed to talk to me, leave me the fuck alone. Please." he had been close to yelling before his voice went quiet on the last word.

"You're a good guy, good police. You deserve better than this." Carly said softly. She patted him on a rare bare patch of skin on his arm, then walked out the door.

Damnit. Now what was he supposed to do? He found himself reaching for Blake's card with his good hand, wanting to tuck it somewhere it wouldn't get lost, just in case. Yeah, just in case.


	2. Chapter 2

He could almost pretend that his new room was an upgrade. First of all, it was a single instead of a double even though it was actually slightly bigger than his old room. And it was in the newer and nicer part of the hospital in a relatively quiet wing unlike his old room that had been on the flight path between Emergency and Pediatrics. Jenn had brought his garden along when he had been moved and at the right angle the plants just about obscured the thick metal bars across the room's only window. And the thick walls of rebar and cement and the hard steel door helped keep what little noise there was outside him room from waking him up when he was trying to sleep.

He could almost pretend it, but Luke had always been the person to have both feet firmly grounded in reality. No matter how nice it was for a hospital room, it was still a room in the secure isolation wing, the place where the criminals and the monsters got sent. He had been quietly exiled to the wing after the blood test had come back positive. They had wheeled him out of his old room for his appointment with the neurologist, and when he had finished, they had put him back here. It had been done with no fanfare or fuss, just a couple of orderlies doing their job that involved putting him into the room where the door locked from the outside.

At least they hadn't chained him to the bed. Not that he was really able to move as it was. Starting at his feet and working upwards, he had a brace on one leg that ran from hip to ankle, a catheter in a spot where nothing should ever get shoved up, a whole mess he didn't want to think about around his abdominal wounds, a heart monitor, a cast on one wrist, and a couple of i.v.s in his arm. At least they had put the tubes in the same arm as the broken wrist so that what was passing for his good arm these days could remain free. He guessed he was supposed to look on the bright side since the nurse had said the catheter was supposed to come out soon, but that seemed to be too small of a victory for him.

He heard a series of beeps as someone outside worked the programmable lock to his room, and the nurse he had just been thinking about stuck her head into his room.

"Officer Bates, you've got a visitor to see you," she said.

"Thanks, Leanne. I'm as ready for company as I can get right now." He had seen fewer visitors since he had been moved. Secure isolation had strict rules in that area, and he had been limited to seeing Jenn and a few other friends during a two hour block of time during the late afternoon. And except for Jenn, the ones who had came by had mostly been looking to leave again the minute they set foot in his room. He couldn't really blame them. The docs claimed that he wasn't contagious right now, but you just couldn't be too careful about shit like that.

Leanne fully opened the door, and a stranger walked into the room. He was a white male in his mid to late twenties. 5'10" and probably about 160. Scruffy brown hair that went past his ears and brown eyes. He wore jeans, an old pair of sandals, a fading Pearl Jam concert t-shirt, and a choker if tiny shells around his neck. There was a softness to his face that made Luke peg the man as a slacker.

"Hello, Luke. I'm Norman. You called Anita Blake yesterday, I'm the one who got sent to talk to you." Norman looked briefly back towards Leanne. "Can we have some privacy for this? Don't worry, I promise to neither harm your patient nor try to stage a jail break with him against doctor's orders."

"The video monitors are covering the room, and I can't turn them off, but there isn't any audio feed that goes with them."

"Thanks," he said, giving Leanne a smile that probably charmed most of the ladies he met. They always seemed to go for that kind of rebel without a cause schitck.

"Hit the intercom button when you're ready to come out," she said as she vanished to wherever the nurses went.

"So you are?" He couldn't quite bring himself to say the word out loud.

"A werewolf? Lycanthrope? Shape-shifting hellspawn? I like to think I'm not quite in the hellspawn category, but the rest of the descriptions fit. And you would be the cop who is the only known surviving victim of a sick bastard named Van Anders. I know you're probably feeling a lot of different emotions right now. Don't let one of them be shame that you're still among the living."

"So I'm getting the pep talk already?"

"It's part of why I'm here. The other part is to start answering the questions I'm sure you've got. The doctors here can go on and on about the biological changes that are happening to you right now, but they haven't lived it and I have. There's a lot we just won't talk to the humans about because you can't understand it until you live it."

"Okay so how much time do I have left then?"

"For what?"

"To still be human."

"We're two weeks out from the full moon, so that's your firm date. As for the secondary characteristics," Norman paused as he came closer to the bed and put his hand on Luke's forehead. To his surprise, the hand felt warm. In the past few days, everyone else that had touched him had felt so cold. "It really varies from person to person. Some people get hit hard with the sensory overload and shit beforehand, but I've also known people who claim they never really felt much at all up until the moon was pulling their beast out of them."

Norman moved his hand off Luke's forehead and began to run his fingers through Luke's close-cut hair. It felt weird; in some way it was intimate. With the way Norman had flirted with Leanne, Luke wouldn't have thought the other man liked guys, but then he had never really had the knack for telling that. Encumbered as he was, he did his best to squirm away from the hand. Fortunately, Norman picked up on his uneasiness and moved his hand back to his side.

"On the bright side of it, you're running a good high fever right now, and that's a sign that your body is kicking it into gear to heal itself. The plan is that in a couple more days, you should be healed enough you should be healed enough for us to spring you from here, even if it's only as far as the clinic. Hospital's probably one of the worst places a new shifter can end up. Too much of other peoples' blood and too much of other peoples' fear that you can never get away from those smells."

Puzzled, he found himself sniffing the air around him as he tried to figure out what Norman meant. It seemed like everything smelled like a hospital always did.

"I don't get it."

"You will. Hopefully later than sooner in your case. When we're in wolf form, we've got a better sense of smell than a bloodhound. It's not quite as intense in human form, but it still takes a while to really learn how to deal with it and the instincts that are tied into it."

"Instincts? What do you mean by instincts?"

"We're predators. Takes some sorting out in the beginning to figure out what is and isn't supposed to be prey." Norman said with a shrug.

Luke had come to think he had learned to judge threats pretty well in the last couple of years. Despite Norman's words, and even though he knew what Norman was, he was still having a hard time seeing the other man as dangerous. The guy probably worked at Best Buy and still lived with his parents.

"I've gotta say I'm feeling like anything but that right now."

"It'll get better soon. I bet the gut wound's already well on the way to healing itself," he said, his fingertips rubbing lightly down Luke's free arm. The guy sure was Mister Gropey. Luke tried to pull his arm away, and Norman barely seemed to notice as he continued on. "Might be a couple of rough days there when your body starts metabolizing the painkillers faster and they just aren't working enough any more, but by then the worst of the damage should have fixed itself. Physically, you're going to be more than fine. Two weeks from now, you'll be as perfect as the day you were born."

"I don't think I'm ready to think that far ahead yet."

"It's not as scary as you probably think. Hard part for me was admitting just how much I ended up liking it all. To stand in the woods with our kind all around me, to feel the rush as the moon rises, it's really good stuff." Norman's hand went southward until it patted just to the outside of the hipbone on the leg that didn't have the giant brace on it.

"Do you have to keep doing that?" he said, doing the best he could to reach down and push Norman's hand away.

"Time for you to start getting used to it."

"I will not be, as you put it, getting used to it."

"Yes, you will." Norman said.

Great. So the local werewolves were a bunch of pervs. Maybe he would be better off signing himself into the safe house like a lot of people had urged him to do. If it was like the hospital, at least he would have a cell to himself, and wouldn't be having to deal with a bunch of guys who seemed to want to get into his pants.

Before the moment could get any more uncomfortable, he was saved by another beep at the door. Leanne let Smith into his room. Back until Smith had signed up for the freak patrol in a moment of insanity, they had worked the same shifts for the same squadron, and had played on the same softball team for a while. He was reliable when the shit hit the fan, and a good guy even if he liked hanging around the freaks too much. The freaks like me now, the thought drifted through his mind.

"So Bates, I heard you were bitching about forced overtime, but this was taking it a little too far to try to get out of it," Smith said.

"Yeah, pretty obvious now, isn't it?"

"I've got to get to work now," Norman said. "It was good meeting you today, and I'll check up on you every day while you're still here, and we can talk some more. I'm also supposed to remind you to not sign anything until we've run it past a Coalition lawyer first. Lot of people trying to bullshit you right and, and you've got to be careful."

"And you've got my best interests at heart?"

"Believe it or not, we do. You're family now."

"So you're that Norman? Anita Blake called to get you on the visitor's list for this area." Smith said. Because of the problems with Humans First a while back, it was a lot harder for civilians to get into secure isolation than it used to be. "Didn't recognize you like that."

"Guess you could say I'm a man with many faces," Norman said as he looked toward Bates. He blinked, then looked like he remembered Smith from somewhere.

"It got really fucking chaotic at the end, and I never got a chance to thank you and Patricia for what you did for RPIT."

"No problem. Tracking's the one thing in life I'm actually good at. I'm glad we could help. I just wish we wouldn't have had to give him over to you guys. For what he did, he died way too easy," Norman said, his voice going low as he spoke. For a split second, his eyes almost sparked with intensity, and Luke got a glimpse of the predator inside the man. Maybe Norman wasn't as soft as he had first thought. Norman blinked, and the predator was gone again, leaving behind the slacker pretty boy. "Manana, Luke."

"See you later," he managed. He couldn't say he was really looking forward to the Norman's next visit, but at least it would break up the monotony a little.

Norman headed out the door, flirting with Leanne along the way. When he had left, Luke found himself turning to the other officer.

"So what was that about anyways?"

"Norman was one of the wolves from the local pack that helped track down Van Anders so that Anita Blake could serve the execution order," Smith said.

"He didn't say anything about it."

"Probably kind of hard to work into a conversation for the most part."

So Norman had been willing to put himself into danger to help take down a guy who was one of the worst serial killers St. Louis had ever seen. It seemed like he had massively underestimated the other man. At least he hadn't said anything too insulting to him, he hoped.


	3. Chapter 3

Jenn was just finishing up her visit when Luke heard the lock beep. The door opened, and Norman walked into his room.

"So this must be the Norman that Luke's been telling me about," Jenn said with a polite smile as she walked across the floor toward him.

"The one and only," Norman said warmly as he shook her hand. "And you must be the lovely Jenn that Luke's been telling me about. Once we get some things sorted out, I ought to get you talking to my fiancee Heather, and you two can go talk about matching bridesmaid shoes and all that shit."

"I didn't know you even had a girlfriend," Luke said. Heck, he hadn't even really been sure that Norman was into girls.

"We've been dating for a couple years now. Bought a house together last spring, and we seriously thinking of getting married then. But Heather's father is in the Army, and he's stuck in Korea until December, and she's all about waiting until he's home so he can walk her down the aisle. So I've got a couple more months of watching her flip out over matching bridesmaids' shoes. What's the deal with those anyways?"

"Well you're hoping that you're only going to get married once in your life, so you want everything to be beautiful and perfect," Jenn said.

"Never mind that I wouldn't be marrying her if I didn't think she was beautiful to begin with. I mean, don't you all get that the guys don't give a damn about the shoes or the flowers or whatever. You could walk down the aisle in a burlap sack, and we'd still think you were the most amazing woman in the world. Heck, it would be even better if you just skipped the burlap sack part."

Norman glanced over at him for a confirmation, and they had one of those perfect moments of guy understanding as Jenn blushed a little bit.

"Yeah, all those things in the bridal magazines that they want you to be worried enough about that you spend a ton of money on them, we just don't care," Luke said.

"But it's not so much about worrying about things. It's fun to get to wear the pretty dress and have a day when you feel like you're a real princess," Jenn said as she collected her sweater from a chair and began to put it back on. "Dang, they keep it eleven million degrees in this part of the hospital."

"They cranked the thermostat up in here for Luke's sake. Heat helps us heal quicker."

"That's what one of the doctors said. I'm glad it's helping him, but it's still pretty warm for me sometimes," she said as she finished adjusting her sweater. She leaned forward across the bed and kissed him on the forehead. Since the test had come back positive, she hadn't kissed him on the lips. He wondered if she realized that. "I'll be back tomorrow, Luke, as soon as I can get back here."

"I'll be looking forward to seeing you, honey," he said. She smiled at him, then went to the intercom by the door and got herself beeped out of the room, leaving him with Norman at his bedside. "So, Heather, is she or isn't she?"

"She's a wolf too. I met her after I got infected. After we'd been together for three years, it just seemed like it was time to make it all official. I just didn't realize what it would mean when she went all full metal bridal on me. Scary watching her get all emotional about what kind of flowers were going to go on the tables at the reception. But enough of talking about that. How are you doing today?" Norman said, his fingers moving along Luke's good arm to the point on his chest just above where the slashes ended. Norman was a toucher, and Luke hadn't figured out a polite way to get him to stop it. And since Norman's hands had carefully stayed clear of his groin, he had figured he was better off just ignoring it rather than causing a fuss about it.

"You know how you were saying I'd get to the point that the painkillers wouldn't work as well as they used to? I'm getting there."

"Is it still bearable?"

"Mostly. I just try to remind myself that it's supposed to be a good sign because it means my gut's healing faster and all that shit. And speaking of shit, I graduated to a bed pan today."

"Yeah, I noticed that the bag was gone." Norman's fingers strayed further south than they had before, and his fingertips very lightly brushed against the places where Van Anders had so forcefully opened him up. His eyes went distant as his fingers traced along the lines of stitches. Darned if Luke had a clue what was going on with him.

"What's up? Some sort of weird wolf voodoo there?"

"Nah. Even if I was some big time alpha wolf, most of them can't go beyond the same apply heat to help speed the healing formula that the rest of us use. I was just thinking that since all the tubes are starting to come out of you, it's probably not too long before we can get you out of here."

"So you mean I'm actually going to get to go home soon?"

"Not to your home just yet. It'll probably be a night or two at our medical clinic, and then you'll spend some time living with me and Heather until we get you through your first couple of full moons."

"Why do I have to go there?"

"The clinic to make sure you're not going to go into shock and die on us after you've already survived so much, and then our house because we've got a safe room in the basement for when you need it, and where you live now isn't going to have some place that's rebar-enforced concrete on all sides."

"I thought that I was signing on with you guys because you were the ones who wouldn't stick me in some concrete box like they would in a safe house."

"The difference is that we'll let you out when the crisis is over and you've calmed down. It's just that a lot of times, it's safest for everyone if you spend some time in there until you get yourself back under control. Heck, we set up the latch so there's a way to let yourself out of the room when you get human hands back."

When he got human hands back. When the full moon came, he was going to turn into something as for from human as it could get. It was so inhuman that until his brain could figure out how to process the signals from how his body was when he had turned into the other that he wasn't going to remember any of it. Norman was going to take him off into the woods somewhere on that night, and him and his buddies were going to watch over Luke as the last part of him that was human flowed out of him in a mass of clear goo. Did he lose his humanity then too? Norman had never set off any alarm bells with him. But he remembered the look in Van Anders' face when the claws had come out and the man had turned to cut into him. What he remembered of Van Anders had been that he had enjoyed every moment he had spent taking down the people in that hallway. He had seen it in the other man's eyes. Had Van Anders been like that before he had gotten infected too, or was it the virus that turned him into something that sick?

"Don't worry. It's all going to be okay. You're going to be okay," Norman said. He now sat by the side of the bed and had both hands rubbing around Luke's arm. "You were strong enough and stubborn enough to pull yourself back when by all accounts you should have been dead. Those are the same traits that are going to help you get control over your beast so you'll rarely ever need the safe room anymore."

"The first couple of days after the attack, it still didn't really seem real. I mean they said the test came back positive. They showed me the paper and everything. But I still felt like me. I'd never had someone try to eviscerate me before. How was I supposed to judge that I was healing way faster than I was supposed to be. But the last two or three days or so, it's like I'm starting to notice things differently. It would start out with me thinking about how I like how the smell of Jenn stays in the room for a while after she's left, and then I'd realize that it wasn't just her perfume. It was something going on. Or how I knew I was always pretty good at reading people. I'm a cop. You have to be if you're going to last in the job. But it's at a different level now. So much easier to know who's coming to my room because they want to, and who's here because they feel like they have to, and who's here even though they're a little bit scared of me. Even though they're a little bit scared of me," he said, his voice trailing off into a whisper.

"And you liked it when they were scared of you," Norman said, his voice more gentle than what the topic should make it.

"There are cops who like their job because they like people being a little bit scared of them. I'm not one of those people. Or at least I wasn't one of those people. And from what you say, it's only going to get worse when I turn into a wolf for real. I don't want to turn into someone like Van Anders too."

"Most of us aren't like Van Anders. Not that we're fuzzy little bunnies or anything, but the ones that turn out that spectacularly evil were bent wrong a long time before they got infected. How many other wolves have you met besides me and Van Anders?"

"That I've known were shifters, and I've talked to for more than ten seconds? Two. They were short blonde twin brothers. I helped them fill out the paperwork so they could take out a restraining order against their father."

"Stephen's one of ours, but Gregory is one of the wereleopards. And if they gave you the full story, their father's far worse of a monster than either of them could ever think of being."

"They didn't say all that much about him directly to me, but from their eyes you could tell they had been the victims in something bad."

"Kind of an understatement. The only reason why Anthony even has the possibility of coming around because Stephen and his therapist think it's a good idea for the moment."

"And if they don't think it's a good idea anymore?"

Norman went quiet, his pupils going yellowish for a split second until he blinked them back to normal brown.

"Then that's for Stephen and Gregory to decide what happens next. But back to my point, we need to get you sprung from here so you can actually get to talking to more of us and learn for yourself that Van Anders doesn't represent who we are. He doesn't represent who you're going to become, even though there are going to be times when you hate yourself for the instincts you now have. It's normal. We've all been there, and somehow the rest of the 500 of us that are in the St. Louis area have avoided turning into serial killers."

"There are that many werewolves in St. Louis? The RPIT report on the number of preternaturals in the St. Louis area said somewhere between fifty and seventy. "

"That's how big the pack here is. So take it as a sign that the police not noticing how many of us there really are as a sign that we normally don't do anything criminal against humans to draw their attention."

Norman's words raised even more questions for Luke, but before he could come up with a way of phrasing them that didn't have Norman going all wolfy Fifth Amendment again, the announcement came that visiting hours in secure isolation were now over.  
Link Leave a comment


	4. Chapter 4

"I come with a guest, and what I think you'll feel is good news," Norman said as he walked into Luke's room. Behind him, another man followed him inside. "Luke, this is Teddy."

"Good to meet you," Teddy said as he walked toward Luke's bedside. Big guy with close-cropped hair and he still looked like he was more muscle than fat. Luke pegged him as a former football linebacker going very slowly to pot despite his best efforts to stay in shape. He passed up Luke's outstretched hand in favor of giving him a thump on the shoulder instead.

"Good to meet you too," Luke said as Teddy finished invading his space.

"Turns out Teddy's more or less permanently on the secure isolation guest list because of the work he does for the Coalition," Norman said, cheerfully ignoring Luke's discomfort just like always. "At first, the idea was that he'd be another wolf you could talk to for now. But then we got a hold of your medical file, and our doc thinks you're in good enough shape that we can get you out of here. Of course, the hospital docs will say you're not ready yet, and by the way are you sure that you don't want to sign yourself into a safehouse for everyone's sake so it would be totally against doctor's orders and all, but we think you're past the danger stage and don't want to see you sitting here when you don't have to be."

"Can you back it up a bit there?" Luke said. Norman was an assistant manager at a Starbucks. There were times when he started to verbally ramble like the teenage girls he usually supervised.

"Are you ready to blow this popsicle stand?" Norman said.

"I think so. The doctors seem to agree that my gut's pretty much healed up, and it seems like there isn't much more they can do for my wrist and knee other than wait for the bones to knit back together." He had even swapped the big leg brace for one that ran from mid-thigh to mid-calf and as of that morning, had been permitted to carefully stumble to the can and back on his own.

"And you're willing to leave here in the care of Norman and myself as representatives of the pack?" Teddy asked.

There was something in his tone that was far more formal than the words might have indicated. He carefully looked Teddy over again. The big man gave Luke the same vibe a lot of bikers did. They could look scary enough, and knew and liked that. But for the most part, they liked it because it meant that outsiders were less likely to bother them than out of any sort of malice. And Norman had never given him a reason to distrust him. Besides, the walls in his room seemed like they were closing in on him more and more every day. He didn't want to think of how claustrophobic he would feel as the full moon got closer and closer.

"Yeah, I'd like to get out of here, and am glad the two of you are willing to help me do it."

"It's a no-brainer. We couldn't leave you, or any of our own behind here," Norman said.

And with that, Teddy sprung into action. He had done the same thing for other people, Luke thought as he watched the big man successfully navigate his way through the hospital bureaucracy. For every reason why the hospital tried to keep him here for his own health and safety, Teddy had a reason why they needed to allow him to be released. When someone threatened to call the cops to try to make Luke stay in secure isolation until after the full moon, Teddy had the Coalition lawyer and a police contact of Anita Blake's both explaining about how Luke was supposed to be free to go unless he had directly threatened anyone. Teddy even packed up his garden and moved it down to his truck despite the hospital's attempts to have it thrown out because it was somehow contaminated. Luke didn't remember much about biology class, but he was pretty sure he couldn't make a plant sick just by breathing on it.

Finally it was all taken care of, and a sour-faced nurse was offering him a seat in a wheelchair so that they could move him down to Teddy's truck parked out in the garage. There was probably a point when he was supposed to go all macho and announce he was going to walk out of there under his own power, but truth be told, he felt like he was running on only about three cylinders. If someone was going to offer him a way to save his energy right now, he would take it.

She wheeled him out of secure isolation and into the chaos of the main part of the hospital. He had known that it was more hectic out there, and had remembered it was noisier. But what he hadn't remembered was the mix of smells that ranged from medicines and antiseptics to illnesses and fears. It didn't seem like anything he couldn't handle, and he knew it would be all over soon. But he had to admit that he was glad for the grip Norman had on his shoulder as they wound through the maze of corridors. It was like the other man actually was keeping him steadier by doing that.

After what seemed like forever, they were finally out of the hospital and into the loading zone of the garage. Teddy pulled up in a late model Explorer that looked like it was both well maintained and used for the purpose God and Dearborn had intended. He found himself thinking a little better of Teddy for that. Norman helped him into the back, settling him on the bench seat so that he could comfortably poke his braced leg between the front seats. He couldn't say he was surprised when Norman decided to sit next to him back there instead of taking the other seat up front. He almost started to say something about it when Norman wrapped an arm around his shoulders, then decided it wasn't worth causing a fuss. After all, he didn't know much about Teddy's driving abilities, and he might as well have someone to keep him steady if the other man made a habit of cornering too fast.

They made a brief stop at a smoothie place, where Teddy ordered him some sort of weird fruity thing that was supposed to be high in both calories and protein powder. It still tasted like a girly drink even if it did seem to be hitting the right spot and kicking up his energy level like Teddy promised it would. Then just as he finished his drink, Teddy pulled the truck in back of a row of aging suburban duplexes that all seemed to have been converted into small office buildings.

"So this is the clinic you were telling me about?" he said.

"It's in the basement of the whole building," Norman said as he helped Luke out of the truck.

"If you get hurt, and are conscious enough to have any say in the matter, call a brother and have them give you a ride over here instead of going to the hospital. Nine times out of ten, we seem to end up having to threaten to call a lawyer to get you out of there again once you pass through the doors of a human emergency room," Teddy said as he slowly led them downstairs and politely nodded at a pair of men that seemed to be some sort of security guards. "They're Dr. Lillian's bodyguards. Right now, she's St. Louis' only lycanthrope doctor, and she's been threatened in the past by some of the other preternaturals in the area."

Then he was walked into a small exam room that contained the biggest hospital bed he had ever seen. Just as he sat down on the side of it, the doctor came into the room and gave him a brief but careful exam. It was still weird how it was now supposed to be a good thing that he had run a hundred and five degree fever for the past week. He thought about asking her how she had gotten her hands on the thick file that looked like it was a copy of his hospital records, but decided that he might not want to know the answer just yet. It had to have been illegal to do that, even if they were trying to help him out.

"So who pays for all this?" he found himself asking after Dr. Lillian had left. From the glimpses he had gotten, it probably wasn't cheap to run the place.

" All the shifter groups in St. Louis. It comes out of our tithe money." Norman said as he slumped down in a chair next to the bed.

"Tithe, like in giving to the church kind of thing?"

"It's pretty much like that. Once you're working again, ten percent of your gross income goes into the pack general fund," Teddy said.

"Just like that, and I don't get any say about it? Not that I remember much about history class, but I do remember that part about no taxation without representation and shit."

"Richard tried making it voluntary about the same time he tried to make the pack more democratic, and both of those things really, really didn't work," Norman said as he exchanged a look with Teddy. "So we ended up going back to the old way because it worked a lot better."

"Because shaking down people is always going to get you more money than passing the plate will. I worked enough neighborhoods where all the businesses were expected to pay protection money to really not like the sound of getting shook down myself." Damnit, he felt like he had earned his pension money fair and square. He wouldn't mind giving some to help out the clinic, but requiring that much of it seemed to go too far.

"It's not about extortion or anything like that. It's about taking care of your own kind because there's no one else out there you can count on to do that. There's the clinic. There's the property tax on the lupanar, on the pack hunting grounds, even though we own it free and clear. There's a couple other businesses we're trying to get off the ground to get more of our people steady employment. There's paying for all the Coalition services. We've got probably the most expensive law firm in St. Louis on retainer because they're also the best there is in the area and we need what they can do. In some ways, you've gone from being the law to being on the wrong side of the law now, and you can't afford to forget it. Some of your former coworkers would be glad to send you to a secure facility for jaywalking now just because they think you're too dangerous to be walking around on the street," Norman said, very serious as he looked Luke in the eyes. "And you can look at it another way. The tithe money goes to things you're actually likely to use at one point or another. It's not like the government taking social security out of your paycheck what all that shit's going to be broke long before either of us can retire and get that money back."

"And the pack also helps cover rent and such when people are having trouble finding work and falling behind on expenses. Our unemployment rate as a group is significantly high," Teddy said. "It's rather like everyone gives according to their ability, and takes according to their basic needs. And speaking of needs, I've got to head over to the office now. Are you sure you don't need a ride anywhere?"

"Nah, I'm okay. After Neal shows up and I get him introduced to Luke, it's easy to take the bus to work from here, and then Heather'll pick me up at the end of my shift."

"It was good to meet you, Luke," Teddy said. "I'll leave the plants out in the waiting room since they'll get more light there."

"Same here. I just wish it was different circumstances," Luke said, still feeling somewhat uneasy about it all.

Teddy patted him on the shoulder, and gave Norman a brief hug before heading out the door.

"Speaking of plants and people, can I use your phone? I need to let Jenn know what's going on, and directions on how to get over here."

"You can use it and tell Jenn you're out of the hospital, but she can't come visit you here," Norman said as he pulled his phone from a pocket and passed it to Luke.

"What do you mean, Jenn can't visit?"

"There are places humans aren't allowed to go. Even if you were already married, she couldn't come here any more than she would be allowed at the lupanar. Going across the different species, there are more than a thousand shifters in the St. Louis area that rely on the clinic staying secure and secret. Their safety is more important than Jenn's feelings about not seeing you for a couple of hours."

"Jenn can keep a secret. She's a court reporter. She works grand jury cases all the time and would never say anything about what's supposed to stay confidential."

"We just can't afford to take that kind of risk, so it's a blanket rule, no matter how trustworthy the human seems. Look, we've had terrorists attacks on preternaturals and their businesses in St. Louis not too long ago, and this is one of the places that Humans First and the like can absolutely now know the location of. And once you're out of here, and at Heather's and my house, Jenn's more than welcome there. She can even sleep over if she wants. It's not a huge house, but we've got space for that. We just need to make sure there's someone else there with the two of you at the time."

"What, like some kind of chaperone? We aren't allowed to go past heavy petting?" he said, meaning it as a joke.

"That's one of the reasons," Norman said, replying in a very serious tone. "The first couple of months, you don't always have the best control over your own actions, and sex is definitely one of the things that can cause all kinds of extra problems with your control. Even if you weren't a cop, you probably would have heard what happened with Louisa. It was all over the fucking news forever. We aren't going to let you do anything that you might regret later on, or anything that might hurt the pack."

"You keep talking about 'we can't', or 'we can'. So just who makes up this we, and how did they end up as the boss of me?" he demanded. The walls in the room were starting to close in on him. He was trapped here just as surely as he had been in the hospital room, as trapped as he would have been if he had agreed to go where the doctors had wanted him to go.

"The rest of the Thronnos Rokke Clan of St. Louis. You were infected in our city, so you're our responsibility now."

"And if I don't want to join your club?" Norman was between him and the first door. He thought he could get past Norman if he tried to take the other man by surprise, but the bodyguards between him and freedom were the wild card. Would they just let him go past them?

"You don't really have much choice. An experienced wolf who came into our territory and didn't cause problems like Van Anders did, we just might kick their ass and let them leave on their own. But we can't let someone just past their first full moon out on the loose. People would end up dead that way, and the city and state governments would turn against us all. We aren't going to let something happen that would get the varmint laws passed all over again."

"So much for you being the good guys compared to the government halfway house," he said bitterly. "I'm feeling like I got hit with a bait and switch."

"First, we aren't like those people. Never say that we are," Norman said, a hint of anger seeping into his voice. "And second, I don't like thinking I've been leading you on somehow. It's just that I couldn't really say everything back in the hospital because they might have been lying about not listening in on us when we were talking. Long experience shows us that we just can't give the humans anything they can use against us."

He couldn't stay there any longer, he thought as a wave of panic slammed through him. He had to get away from the basement room, away from the Norman who wasn't the mellow slacker he seemed to be. The Norman who was suddenly sounding like there was some sort of war going on, a war where Luke wasn't sure he was signed up for the right side. He had to run, even if his leg wasn't quite right yet. He had to get out of there now.

"Gotta go to the can," he said as he wobbled his way off the bed, his voice just barely steady.

He moved past Norman carefully. The door to the bathroom was close to the door to the hallway. He just might have a chance to make it. He acted like he was reaching for the bathroom door, then at the last instant, spun and went for the hallway door instead. He fumbled it open, stepped past the threshold, and began to run as best he could down the hall.

Hands caught him from behind. He tried to spin around to face his attacker, but the other guy was too quick for him. He was trapped and was getting pressed into the cement block wall almost before his brain could process what was going on. He was trapped and he was going to die down here, down where he'd be eaten before anyone else knew what had happened to him. He started to scream at his attacker as he still tried to fight an opponent who was far stronger than he was. And then everything went black.

**************************

Luke slowly started to notice what was going on around him again. First, it was Norman's voice murmuring softly in his ear and using the same tone Luke would use when trying to calm down stray dogs and feral children. It was something about getting out of the clinic for a while, and that there was a good ice cream place down the street they could walk to, or in Luke's case, hobble to. Then it was sight. There was another man in the hallway, a different guy than the bodyguards he had seen earlier. He had brown hair, and wore Dockers and a button down shirt, and there was something about him that put Luke on notice. Then it was touch. Norman was holding him against the wall with one arm. How had a civilian managed to do that to him? His other hand was lightly stroking through Luke's short hair.

"Do you have to keep doing that?" he grumbled.

"Welcome back," Norman said with a half chuckle as he carefully let go of Luke. "When you're complaining about that, I know you're back in your own head again. Any pain in your abdomen? Doc would skin me if I just popped one of your stitches, or otherwise screwed with your recovery."

"Nothing more than usual. What just happened to me there?" He still wasn't precisely happy with where he was, but the awful compulsion to run for the hills was gone. In part, it was replaced by a wave of fatigue. He tried to take a couple of steps, but wobbled enough that he was glad for Norman's help in getting back to the room where he could sit on the bed.

"Welcome to the world of fight or flight reflexes," Norman said. "You're hurt and in an unfamiliar place, so instinct kicks in and tells you to get out of here, and into what you feel like is a safe place so you can heal. It kind of hits you like a load of bricks the first couple of times."

You could say that." He had been totally gone out there in the hall, and it scared him enough that he could see a couple of Norman's points more clearly. What if that happened when he was around Jenn? What if she got hurt?

"Richard," Norman said, turning to the dark-haired man who had followed them into the room. He very carefully refused to meet the man's eyes.

"You were a little busy when I came in. You handled that well enough." Richard said.

Norman stepped toward Richard. Luke wasn't surprised to see him hug Richard and rub his cheek against the other man's face. Then Norman basically french-kissed Richard, and Luke found himself pointedly staring down at his knee brace. He had been stuck patrolling in Soulard a handful of times, and there were some things he just never wanted to have to see again. Fortunately, they finished that up quickly and Richard turned his attention to Luke.

"Hello, I'm Richard Zeeman, and I am Ulfric of the Thronnos Rokke Clan." Richard patted him on the shoulder like Teddy had. Luke was massively relieved that it ended at that.

"Luke Bates, in the process of formerly being part of the St. Louis PD," he said, getting better at keeping the bitterness out of his voice. He was a good cop. He liked being a good cop. It hurt to admit that that part of his life was coming to a close.

"Anita told me that they were pensioning you off the force. I'm genuinely sorry that you've got to go through all of this. The pack should have learned about Van Anders sooner, and acted sooner to get rid of the intruder in our midst. If we had, you never would have gotten tangled up in this kind of life," Richard said.

Luke took at deep breath, and looked at Richard. There was genuine regret in his face along with a glimmer of anger over what had happened. And there was something about the way Norman was acting around Richard that suggested it would be a bad idea to give Richard a reason to let the anger to come to the front. And even if that wasn't there, he was still going to have to deal with these people for a good long while.

"The only person I'm trying to blame right now is the person who did this to me. You people, I've heard what you did to make sure he ended up good and pushing up daisies, and it makes me happy to know he's never going to hurt anyone else again because of what you all did." Sometimes you really did need to speak ill of the dead.

"I don't think Van Anders even really qualified as a person," Norman said, his voice going low. "I'd say he was more like pond scum, but then that's an insult to pond scum."

"Maybe if there is reincarnation, he'll come back as an amoeba," Richard said, a small smile briefly crossing his face.

"Where hopefully some bigger critter comes along and eats him alive," Luke said.

"Definitely," Richard said. "It was good to meet you. And now that you're out of the hospital, I trust Norman's going to do a good job of teaching you how to control your beast, and what you need to know about pack culture."

I will, Ulfric," Norman said. Luke got the feeling he was missing something again. Then he got another pat on the shoulder, Norman got another hug, and Richard headed out of the building.

"So what was all of that about?" Luke said.

"Which particular that are you asking about now?" Norman said.

"You kissing another guy. And you're supposed to be engaged and all."

"It's not about sex."

"Then what else could it be about?"

"Power. It's more like 'hey, I know I was kind of ignoring you when you walked in, so please don't hold it against me'. Richard's heart is in the right place, but he's got a temper, and he's been on the edge a lot lately. I didn't want to give him an excuse to take something that's bugging him out on me."

"I think you lost me back there again."

"Body language is important. Normally, you greet another pack member by getting close to them and rubbing cheeks so you can get the scent of them just behind their ear," Norman said. To Luke's great relief, he didn't feel the need to demonstrate again what Luke had seen him do with Teddy and Richard. "But if it's a case when you need to let someone that outranks you know that you're acknowledging their dominance, then you give them a kiss on the cheek if you're out in public, or you lick along their lower lip if you don't have to worry about prying eyes."

"And if I don't want to kiss another guy?"

"Then you'll get your ass kicked seven ways to Sunday until you do. And since it's another wolf doing the damage, you end up healing almost human-slow."

"I can't do that." No way could he do that. "There's no other way?"

"There's no other way. You're talking about something that goes back through a couple thousand years of lukoi culture. If it helps, you do get used to it quicker than what you'd think."

"It's like every time I turn around, I'm getting told that there's something else in my life that I don't like, and can't change, and I'm just supposed to suck it up and deal with it?"

"That's kind of life in general, if you think about it. And in some ways, it will get better once you make it through your first full moon. It makes so much more sense, and doesn't seem as bad once you're feeling it all for yourself instead of me just telling you about it. And six months from all, you end up getting about seventy five percent of your old human life back in some way."

"Except for the losing my job part." And the weird touching and kissing part.

"You never know. Maybe someday they'll change the rules. God knows they could use us on some of their cases. In the mean time, it's time to start teaching you more about werewolf culture. There's a lot you need to know as a member of the pack..."


	5. Chapter 5

Luke woke up slowly the next morning, glad for a change to be allowed to sleep on his own schedule rather than getting woken up a half dozen times by alleged health care professionals. He opened his eyes to see Neal curled up on a cot one of the wererats had brought into his room the night before. From what Norman had said the night before, Neal had probably expected to share the bed with him, but that was something that was never going to happen and was not open to negotiation. The blanket Neal had claimed the night before had been kicked onto the floor, and he had curled himself into a ball while he snored lightly. Luke wondered just how sound of a sleeper Neal was.

He still wasn't entirely sure of the St. Louis wolves, even if he felt like he was trusting Norman more and more all the time. He briefly fantasized about slipping past Neal and calling up Jenn so she could get him his car and he could just start driving until he was far far away from lukoi and halfway houses and anything remotely involving werewolves. But in the end, he knew he could never run away from himself no matter how much that having to live with himself was going to suck.

Then his chance to escape slid away as Neal woke up and Norman reappeared in his room in quick order.

"I know it's a cliche to say it, but I come bearing breakfast," Norman said as he held up a white paper bag in the other mens' direction. Luke's stomach began to make loud demands as the smell of ham and sausage wafted to his nose.

"Enough for everyone?" Neal asked, stretching as he got off the cot.

"Of course," Norman said, lightly shaking the bag as Neal walked across the room.

"Thanks for the grub," Neal said, going through the hugging and cheek-rubbing process before pulling some sort of breakfast sandwich from the bag.

"And thanks for keeping an eye out for Luke last night."

"No problem since you're the one letting me crash at your place tomorrow while they allegedly fix the pipes for good at my condo."

"Heather made me promise that I wouldn't let you stay in a place that wasn't going to have water for two or three days."

Neal gave Norman a pat on the shoulder, then briefly ran his fingertips along Luke's uninjured leg. Before Luke even really had a chance to protest at that, Neal headed out the door with plans for a brief stop at home before he went to work.

"Now you need to show me a proper greeting before you get breakfast," Norman said, dangling the food bag in front of Luke, then moving it just beyond where he could reach when he was still on the bed.

"I have to?"

"Yes. You have to."

"And this isn't just a way to haze or make fun of the new guy?"

"Definitely not."

He wanted to stall or refuse further, but the smell of pork and the promise of real non-hospital food wore him down quicker than he would have thought.

"If it's the only way I get to eat," he sighed as he carefully got up from bed and awkwardly put his arms around Norman. He gave Norman a still-armed hug, brushing his face against the other man's as instructed, then tucked his nose behind Norman's ear as instructed. He gave a brief sniff, but was rewarded with only the smell of Norman's shampoo and hair product. As he tried to pull back from Norman, the other man stopped him until he had finished his own investigation of the area behind Luke's ear.

"Lots of sniffing there. Don't tell me I stink or something."

"Actually you smell better than you did yesterday. Less hospital disinfectant and more like a wolf," Norman said as he finally let go. Luke wasn't sold on that as a better thing but held his peace long enough to start working his way through the rest of the sandwiches.

"So I'm assuming the good doctor that saw you after I left last night didn't say you had any further diet restrictions," Norman said just as Luke was about to start on his third sausage biscuit.

"She actually said that my guts seemed to be healed up enough I could venture away from the soft stuff, and that some extra calories could help my knee finish up healing now that the abdominal wounds weren't such a priority fix for my body."

"That's good news then. Heather's a good cook who loves to make food for other people, and I'd hate to disappoint her by telling her you were still on the jello and thick liquids plan."

After he finished eating, he was able to pull off the knee brace for long enough to take as hot a shower as he could possibly stand. When he felt as clean and warm as he possibly thought he could, he shut down the water, dried off, and had just barely managed to wrap a towel around his waist when Norman reappeared without warning.

"You know you could have knocked," he grumbled as he took the sweatpants and underwear from the other man. Thankfully the briefs were new to the point of being in its original packaging.

"I didn't really see the need to," Norman said, shrugging, "The clinic's got some shoes to go along with the stash of clothing they keep on hand, but I figured we'd be bringing some of your stuff over to our house today anyway, so there wasn't much point to digging through that pile. Where'd you say you lived again?"

"Hazelwood," he said, pulling the briefs on underneath the towel. With everything important covered, he removed the towel, balled it up, and tossed it into a basket in the corner. Because of his bad knee, he had to reach over and lean on Norman for support as he put the pants on, an action that Norman seemed oddly too happy about.

"Crap. We're in Imperial, and that's exactly the wrong direction to go if I want to be able to make it to work in time after I drop you off. You can make a list, and I'll have one of the other guys go do the pick up."

"Or I could call Jenn up, and she can take care of it. She's already got a key, and she's got vampire court duty tonight, so she doesn't have to be into work until noon." Norman had claimed that Jenn wound be welcome at his house. It was time to see if he really meant it.

"That's probably the best way of doing it," Norman said. He had to pull away from Luke in order to get a phone out of his pocket. As Norman's arm lost contact with Luke's back, he found himself suddenly feeling wobblier than he had been moments before.

Jenn had been waiting to hear from him, and answered on the first ring. They quickly made arrangements for Jenn to grab his toothbrush and a few other essentials. He wanted to talk to her longer, but the longer they talked, the longer it would take before he saw her in the flesh again. With a sigh, he passed the phone over to Norman so he could give Jenn directions, only then noticing it had been his arm this time that had slid under the hem of Norman's shirt and wrapped itself around the other man's back.

***************

"And Heather, this is Luke," Norman said as a pretty, pale woman made her way into the living room from the dining room.

"Good to meet you," she said with a smile and not much else. She was bare from the waist up, and the sarong she had tied around her hips was thin enough and transparent enough that he could tell she was a natural redhead. Being told in the abstract that casual nudity was common among the wolves, and that it was considered bad manners to notice it was one thing. Having the living, breathing fiancee of the guy he was coming to consider as a friend standing right in front of you was another matter entirely.

"And it's good to meet you too. Norman sings your praises pretty highly," he said, doing his best to put one of his old cop faces on. He would appear to be pleasant and polite, and would not let himself react no matter how much someone else wanted to get a rise out of him.

Heather gave Norman a good old-fashioned human style kiss on the lips before moving on to greet Luke as well. To his relief, she seemed to sense his discomfort, and left a junior high dance's amount of space between them as they went through the brief ritual. He wasn't sure if he was picking it up or making it up, but Heather definitely seemed to smell like Norman.

"So do you garden much? Teddy ended up dropping your plants off here last night instead of leaving them at the clinic, and they're out on the back deck now. There are a couple of them that really need to be replanted, but I didn't want to mess with them without knowing what your plans for them were yet," she said.

"The plants were Jenn's idea. People kept wanting to bring me flowers in the hospital, and I kept bitching to her about how they all seemed to be funeral flowers and I wasn't ready for that yet."

"That's the kind of attitude that kept them from being funeral flowers," she said, a welcoming smile on her face. "Now why don't we give you the nickel tour before your Jenn makes it over here."

The tour started after he followed them up to the second floor of the tidy colonial home.

"First bedroom here gets used as my office," Heather said "I'm a technical writer, and good enough that my boss lets me work from home usually four days a week. Which works out well when Norman's sponsoring someone because we can make sure there's always someone with that person while he's at work."

"It's been a long time since I needed a babysitter," he said. He wanted to be polite to the people who were opening their home up to him, but he couldn't resist poking at the implication that he couldn't be trusted alone with himself.

"Pack can't afford to take any chances right now, so there's always going to be someone with you until we're a hundred percent sure of you," Norman said unapologetically.

"Next up we have our overflow guest room. It's your space as long as you're here," Heather said as she lead them to the next door.

He stepped around Heather and peered inside. A queen-sized bed covered in a brown and green comforter took up most of the space in the small room, barely leaving enough space for a night stand to one side of the bed, and a bureau in the corner.

"That looks nice," he said.

"The mattress is basically new. When we've got pack guests overnight, they normally end up crashing with us in our bed instead," Heather said.

"Is that what you're going to make me do to?"

"There are going to be times when you're going to be required to share a bed for a night with an injured pack member in order to help them heal," Norman said, the undercurrent in his voice saying that Luke better not have a problem with that scenario. "The rest of the time, you do what's most comfortable for you, and before too long you're going to learn that it's more comfortable to be with your own kind than not."

"You say that like you're so sure of how I'm going to feel."

"I've been all the way through it. You haven't yet." And for a brief moment, Luke was reminded of all the times when he was a kid and the adults seemed to think they knew better than him just because they were adults.

"Onward with the tour now, boys, before the cloud of testosterone gets too thick for Luke to see anything," Heather said jokingly in order to get people moving again. They showed him the only full bathroom in the house, Heather and Norman's bedroom with the king-sized bed where Luke was apparently welcome any time those two weren't having sex, and then looped back downstairs for the living room, dining room, kitchen circuit. Norman briefly took him on the back deck, and they were about to take him into the basement when the doorbell rang. Luke felt saved by that; he wasn't quite ready to go down there and face the reality of a safe room down there. He watched as Heather grabbed a wrap dress from the coat closet on the way to the front door with the moves of someone who had done it a hundred times before, and then his Jenn was walking through the door with a smile on her face and a duffle bag in one hand. She quickly dropped the duffle and he found himself wrapped in a careful but firm embrace from his girl.

"If you you knew how much time I spent praying that I'd get to see you walk out of that hospital instead of going out through the morgue," she said, doing the best to fight back tears in her voice. "And now to see that it's really happened, no matter how it happened, I just don't feel like I've got the right to tell God he didn't do it quite right."

"One of the big reasons why I fought so hard to live was because I didn't want to leave you," he said, running his fingers through her hair and kissing her on the forehead. Eventually they pulled away just enough from each other that Jenn could put her hand on his stomach, tracing her fingers along the scars that were too quickly starting to fade back into his skin. "And then when the test came back, I was worried you'd be the one leaving me."

"It was a little scary for me too, but after it all, you're still my Luke, and I'll still love you unless you do something to break my heart," she said, pulling him back into a tight hug so that her face rested against his shoulder. He put his own arms around her and closed his eyes so he could pay more attention to his other senses. The smell of her hair as it brushed against his chin was distinctly Jenn. He could feel the steady beat of her heart as she leaned into him, the power of her lungs as she breathed against his collar bone, and the softness of her arms as they rested against his back. It was the biggest reason why he was willing to try Norman's way of doing things, the promise that if he did as the pack told, then at the end of the day he could find himself in Jenn's arms again.

"I hate to interrupt, but I've got to get through the introductions before I head into work," Norman said from his spot in the corner. "Jenn, this is my fiancee Heather, and Heather, this is Luke's Jenn. Out of respect to Luke's recent injury, please try to keep the mentions of Martha Stewart Weddings to a minimum."

"Hey, I'm not that bad," Jenn protested as Heather made a face at her man. She reached out to shake Jenn's hand, a gesture Luke found almost odd after the long streak of lycanthrope greetings.

"Good to meet you," Heather said as Jenn twisted free from him just enough to reach Heather's hand. "Norman's said a lot of good things about you. Thanks for sticking with Luke through this so far. It's not always easy for the people we love and who love us."

"What else was I supposed to do? Blame the victim who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and who was only trying to do the right thing? I just couldn't do that to Luke."

"Lots of people don't see it that way though, " Norman said, briefly patting both Luke and Jenn on the shoulders before moving toward the door. "I'm out of here now. Luke, pay attention to what Heather says, and the both of you if Heather offers to make you lunch, I'd definitely take her up on the offer. Weddings isn't the only Marthazilla magazine she reads all the time."

Norman left the house, leaving the three of them in the living room. His instructions to pay attention to what Heather said definitely translated into he was supposed to do what she said to do. But as long as his Jenn was still there, he could probably handle it.

"So Luke said you were working vampire night court tonight? That's got to be an interesting part of your job," Heather said.

"Usually I'm so into the zone when I work, what kind of case going on around me doesn't register all that differently. Sensational murder case or bar fight kind of all seems the same to me. And even if I really did notice much other than what I'm transcribing, vampire night court would probably be more boring than mot day cases. I'd guess about ninety five percent of it is either civil cases, or cases that got scheduled for night because a vampire was supposed to testify."

"I hadn't realized vampires testified all that much in the real world. I mean I see them on Law & Order, but beyond that..." So Heather might be something of a courtroom television junkie.

"It happens more than what people think, especially since one of the best forensic accountants in eastern Missouri is seriously sunlight challenged," Jenn replied, as the two women built on the beginnings of the conversation and gradually morphed it into some sort of female bonding conversation Luke began to feel left out of. All things considered, he guessed he should just do his best to see it as a positive that the two women seemed to be getting along so well despite their differences.


	6. Chapter 6

"So how about we go outside and get you some fresh air?" Heather said as she headed toward the kitchen.

"You're heading outside dressed like that?" Luke said. After Jenn had left for work, Heather had quickly stripped her wrap dress back off, leaving her essentially naked again. It just didn't seem right for her to go walking around like that when they were alone in the house together and both engaged to different people.

"Why not? One of the big selling points of the house was the eight foot tall fence in the backyard and a lack of neighbors with two story homes so it would be really private back there. Now c'mon." Heather grinned as she pulled a group of storage bowls from a cabinet, and walked onto the back deck. "Besides, it's not like I see you pulling on a shirt either."

"Fabric makes the gut wounds itch," he said as he followed her out the door, sidestepping both a large porch swing, and the pots that had come from his hospital room.

"And there are some itches that will just never go away," she said, leading him across the lawn and to her large garden. "I'm assuming the knee's still too fragile for much bending and stooping, but there's still a lot of blackberries to pick."

"That I can help you out with. My wrist healed almost as fast as my gut did," he said as he accepted one of the bowls from her. He had never been much for gardening before the hospital. Hunting and gathering was best done at Schnucks or Walmart. But after all he'd been through, he'd rather be outdoors picking berries than sitting inside waiting for the walls to all close in on him.

As he picked at the bushes, Heather worked her way through tending tomato plants, corn, peppers, and what looked like some kind of squash. There were more than enough ripe berries that he quickly filled the bowl. He carefully bent down and set the bowl on the ground, and then began to pick them off the bush to snack on as he waited for Heather to finish. He crunched down on the fruit, feeling the sweetness on his tongue and seeds catch between his molars. It was some of the best fruit he had ever tasted, he thought as he swallowed the pulp of it. If he hadn't gotten infected, he probably would have still been getting food into and out of him in a tube.

"Everything okay? You look like you're a little bit upset there." Heather said from amid the squash.

"Just thinking about what I would have been doing right now if Van Anders had used a knife instead of claws."

"Still in the hospital, you mean?"

"Yeah, and it's like I'm kind of glad I'm not there."

"And then you feel guilty that you're glad you're not in the hospital," Heather said, brushing herself off as she stood up. She cut across her garden and walked to him until she stopped near him to wrap her fingers around his wrist. The touch reassured him, and the rest of her was close enough but not too close. "That sort of guilt is something Norman doesn't really understand. He hasn't had to survive an attack and then try to reconcile what you feel with what all the humans say you're supposed to feel. For all her faults, at least Raina asked him if that was what he wanted to do with his life. "

"And you understand it?"

"I was seventeen years old, and we were living in Colorado Springs because Dad somehow got himself assigned to Cheyenne Mountain as a liaison person. It was winter, and dark, and I went out to knock the snow off my car before I drove to school. The wolf came at me from behind. My father heard the noise, and came running out of the house. He emptied a clip into the wolf. It wasn't silver, so it didn't kill it, but he hurt it enough that it ran away before it could kill me. But not before I got clawed up pretty badly."

"I'm sorry about that," he said, instinctively closing the gap between the two of them until his side pressed against hers in order to offer comfort.

"Not like it's your fault," she said, moving her hand off his wrist so she could give him a quick hug. "I just wanted to tell you about it so you'd know you weren't the only one who didn't want to be here, or have that kind of plan for life. For one, I always wanted kids, and I know that's never going to happen naturally now, and they don't let people like us adopt. But that doesn't mean it's some sort of betrayal of yourself to admit that there can be good times or things you like about your life now. That's probably the worst kind of attitude you can have. There's a lot of hard and a lot of suck in our life, and you just have to be able to enjoy what you can to keep from going crazy."

"So you're saying I should enjoy the blackberries?"

"The blackberries and everything else. Just take a deep breath and smell the life all around you."

He inhaled, taking as much air into his lungs as possible. Most of what he smelled was Heather. For all that his head said that she was Norman's, she was still a very beautiful mostly naked woman standing next to him and as a straight guy, he couldn't not react to that for much longer. Best not to go there, both because of his own values and Norman's lecture on proper werewolf manners. With regret, he untangled himself from Heather, and took a couple careful steps away from her.

"Let me try that again." This time he closed his eyes as he breathed, the smell of garden and trees and ant hill and garden toad and dragonfly and water formed almost a blanket around him.

"What do you smell now?"

"It seems like everything." A few more breaths and he could smell the dog down the block and the lady down the street checking her mail and the car driving the next street over.

"And we're tied into it all more tightly than any human could ever be. Life at every stage of the cycle," Heather said as he opened his eyes again. She started to say more, but then snapped her head around to a noise and smell near the other fence line. "Squirrel over there."

With that, she sprinted toward the fence as he picked up the scent of something that promised to be far more filling than what the berries had been. Meat. He followed as best he could, but before he could close the gap, Heather had climbed up a twisted oak tree in pursuit.

"Shit, he heard us coming," she said with a sigh as she took a seat in one of the lower branches of the tree.

"It would have been a good snack," he said, the words sounding odd even as they came out of his mouth. But he just knew how good it would have tasted. "Shit, don't tell me you're going to have me chasing cars too next?"

"Maybe," she said, drawing the word out into a half dozen syllables.

Then she began to giggle, and at first he wanted to glare at her for mocking him, but then he just had to join in with his own laughter. They were still laughing when Norman, home from work, made his was into the backyard. Heather dropped from the tree and bounced herself toward Norman, the other man easily catching her in his arms.

"How's everything going?" Norman said, as he came up for air from Heather's kiss.

"Pretty good. Got my work for the day knocked back early, and then Luke and I were enjoying the weather while it's still nice. Any you?"

"Same old, same old. Remind me why I thought it was good to try to get into management?"

"Because you said you were sick of working for people who were dumber than you were." Heather said as he set her down.

"That was probably part of it," Norman said, one hand motioning to Luke. "And how was your day?"

"It was definitely good to get Jenn over here for a while," he said, hobbling over to Norman. He went through the greeting that Norman expected, this time picking up something underneath the coffee and hair gel. It was a scent of forest decidedly different from how the backyard smelled, and there was something about it that Luke could only describe as smelling right.

"I'm glad she seems to want to try to make it work with you," Norman said as they finished the greeting. "In that same vein, I talked to Sarah, and she said she could make it over later tonight to have a talk."

"Who's Sarah?" Luke said.

"Sarah is one of the people who act as Eros or Eranthe in the pack. Think of her as someone in charge of the most important sex ed classes you'll ever take," Norman said. "We aren't going to let another Louisa situation happen, so I wanted her to start talking with you as soon as possible about what's expected of you."

Norman went quiet on the subject after that, saying that Luke would have to wait for Sarah to come and answer the questions he had. Even Luke's best interrogation techniques didn't seem to help pry more information away from the other man.

******************************************

The plan had been to grill the pork chops that had been marinating in the fridge for dinner. So Luke and Norman loaded up the grill with a mix of charcoal and mesquite chips, added way too much lighter fluid to the mix just because it was fun, and then talked about a dozen different things ranging from baseball to politics to the evil that was a gas grill as they waited for the coals to go grey. It felt like the most normal thing he had gotten to do since the attack, and he did his best to give himself to enjoy the smell of the grill and the feel of fading sunbeams across his bare back.

"Looks like we're ready for the meat now," Norman said as he eyed the grill.

"I can go inside and get it," he said.

"So the knee's starting to feel better on you?"

"I guess. I haven't really noticed it all that much today, and my kneecap was hurting so much the day before," he said before making his way back onto the deck, through the house, and into the kitchen where Heather was working on a salad.

"You're definitely going to have to try the tomatoes," she said with a smile. "They're home-grown heirloom ones. Even if you don't think you like those red flavorless blobs you find at the store, you're going to like these."

"I'll do that," he said as he moved around her to take the dish of pork from the fridge. He normally only had use for tomatoes in catsup, but he didn't want to seem rude. That, and he had been genuinely impressed with all the different fruits, vegetables, and herbs Heather grew in her garden.

"Shit," Heather mumbled softly from somewhere on the other side of the fridge door.

"What's that?"

"The knife slipped there."

Then he smelled it. It was something so much more intense and wonderful than the dead meat in the bowl between his hands. It was the stuff of life itself sliding in a stream down Heather's palm. It promised sustenance and pleasure and other things he didn't quite know how to put into words yet. He set the bowl on the kitchen counter and watched as Heather briefly ran her own tongue over the wound before turning on the faucet to wash the blood away.

She was wasting it, he frantically thought as the precious red was flushed down the sink. He couldn't let her waste it. Before he even really thought about what he was doing, he had stepped next to her to grab at her hand and pull it away from the sink.

"No. Let go of me," she said as looked him in the eyes.

But he couldn't do that. The blood called to him. He could almost already taste how good it would be as he moved her hand toward his lips.

And then before he could complete the act, Heather sprung at him, twisting him away from her, and shoving him face first into the door that went to the dining room. At first he struggled in hope of getting to her bloody hand, then bloodlust turned to panic because no matter what he did, Heather knew a way to counteract it so that he stayed pressed up against the door. She was a civilian. She was a girl. She shouldn't be able to keep him pinned like she did. Then, as he felt her press her groin against his butt and her fingernails dig into his wrists, it turned into something else entirely. He felt himself getting hard from the contact, and made yet another attempt to twist around to face Heather, not so he could escape her or fight her, but so that he could pull the sweatpants off and let her push him down onto the kitchen floor where she would pin him and his wrists to the tile there.

"Aw crap, Norman. He's not going to calm down until I stop bleeding around him." Heather said, her voice and heartbeat calm enough she seemed almost tranquilized.

"Then I've got him while you clean up," the voice came from behind him, and Luke realized he had been too caught up in Heather that he hadn't even smelled Norman come in from the backyard. "Ready?"

"Go."

Heather let go of him briefly and began to back away. He tried to spin to follow her, but before he could even get sideways, Norman was there to get a grip on him and shove his face back against the fridge. He used one arm to twist Luke's arm behind him, and the other one to push down on Luke's shoulder.

"Down on your knees," Norman said, pulling back on Luke's arm hard enough to make it really hurt.

In response, he shifted his feet around to get a little more traction and leverage. If he did it right, he had one chance to try to take Norman backwards into the kitchen counter and get himself free.

"Don't even think of it. I told you to get down on your knees." Norman said. Something was going on beyond just Norman's words. He could feel heat from where the other man was pressed against him, could smell a forest all around them even though they were still in the house. And tangled up in it all was the sensation that something dark and not human was growing deep inside of him, and that something that had wanted Heather so much now wanted to do what Norman told him to do.

"No," he managed as he managed a feeble grab behind him in an attempt to claw at Norman's face.

"Yes. Down on your knees now."

He fought it inch by inch, fought both the strange compulsion and the pain Norman was causing him. But no matter what he tried, he couldn't make Norman stop pushing him to the floor, until he ended up with his legs on the tile, his good knee taking most of the weight, and his hurt leg to the side serving mostly as balance.

"Submit." Norman instructed.

He was on the ground while Norman was standing. It was pretty obvious just who was in control, and it wasn't him. So what else was he supposed to do?

"Submit," Norman repeated, this time giving Luke's arm enough of a twist to send shooting pain to Luke's shoulder.

Then some sort of instinct from the thing growing inside him took over, and he found himself tilting his head sideways until his face brushed against the hand still pressing down on his shoulder. Norman shifted around and adjusted his grip on Luke so he could bend down closer to him. Norman went on to sloppily lick along the line of Luke's throat until he reached the collarbone. A small part of him still wanted to struggle and try to get away from the other man, but that part of him was slowly fading out to what the wolf was supposed to do. And right now, the wolf had realized it had lost, and was awaiting whatever happened next with a surprisingly calm sense of resignation.

"I can hear your heart rate slowing back down, and can smell that you're settling down. So I'm going to let go of you now. Turn around, but stay on the floor," Norman ordered.

"I will," Luke said. Norman made his point one last time, sinking his teeth into Luke's shoulder with enough force to really hurt even if he didn't break the skin. Then Norman let go of him, and he found himself spinning to face the other man as quickly as his gimpy leg would let him. "What the fuck was that for?"

"You were sniffing around my woman," Norman said as he took a seat in front of Luke, his back to the kitchen cabinets. "I know the human side of you wouldn't try to pull anything with Heather. Even if you didn't have Jenn, you aren't the kind of person to go trying to take another man's girl. But your beast needed a reminder that Heather was off limits because she was already an alpha shifter's mate."

He felt relief at Norman's words. He had started to really like Heather, thought she was a babe and a half, and would like to consider her a friend if he hadn't screwed things up between them. But she wasn't his Jenn and never would be.

"Thanks for not letting me do something stupid there."

"One of the biggest parts of a sponsor's job is to keep you from doing things you'd end up regretting. And to keep you under control when you can't control yourself." Norman said as he stroked Luke on the calf. For a brief moment, there was the sense of heat and forest again, and then it was gone.

"What is all that shit anyways?"

"Magical power," Norman said letting what he had given a name to dance along Luke's leg. "A new shifter has to learn how to control himself. One of the signs of an alpha werewolf is that they're able to be conscious enough of our own magic that they can use it to control or affect others."

"So what you did to me there was some sort of magic?"

"Give the cop a cookie. I can use our magic enough that way to keep a new shifter under control. It's one of the reasons why I got sent to be your sponsor instead of Teddy. He's not as good at it as I am, and we needed someone strong enough to handle a guy who had been trained how to fight and physically control a situation."

So Norman was supposed to be stronger than Teddy was. It was something he wouldn't have really understood before, but after what he had felt Norman do to him, it made more sense now.

"And how does Richard fit in with it all?" he said, remembering how careful Norman had been around the other man.

"He's a couple of levels beyond what I can do. My advice is to try not to do anything that gets him angry. He's strong enough to pull your beast out of you and force you to shift when you don't want to. And when that happens, it will really, really hurt."

"I thought that werewolves were supposed to be all fast healing and shit once they got past the first moon."

"We are," Heather said as she walked back into the kitchen. She showed her hand to the men. There was a very old looking scab over where the cut had been. "But we still have nerve endings like any normal human being."

Luke felt a rush of embarrassment about what he had wanted to do with her, what he had actually tried to get her to do.

"I'm sorry about what I did there," he told her, not really feeling like a simple apology would be enough after what had happened.

"Shit happens when you're first learning control over your beast. Apology is accepted this time, but you've expected to work hard to prevent a repeat performance. And next time, don't just go trying to take. All you had to do was ask, and I would have shared with you."

"Share?" he said, not quite getting her last point.

"The blood from my cut."

He wanted to protest that it had been something else on his mind when he had grabbed for her. Just what that something else was, he didn't know, but he was having a hard time admitting that she had gotten what he wanted exactly right. But there really wasn't any point in trying to lie to a couple of people who had sharp enough senses that they could act as living polygraphs either.

"Next time, I promise to ask first," he settled on saying, disturbed at just how much a part of him liked the idea that there was going to be a next time.

"Good," Norman said, brushing himself as he stood up again. "And now it's time to get those chops on the grill before the coals go cold on us."

"So now we're supposed to just go back and make dinner like nothing happened?" Luke said.

"No, now we're going to have dinner because you're really starting to react like a lycanthrope now, and because letting yourself get hungry because you got distracted by something else is going to make it harder for you to keep your beast under control," Norman said. "So let's get the meat, go get some fresh air, and let Heather get back to making salad and dessert."

Luke almost sighed as he picked up the platter of chops. He supposed they would taste well enough when they were cooked, but he found himself thinking about how ugly, cold, and lifeless they looked there sitting on the plate compared to what they really should be.


	7. Chapter 7

Norman made the introductions between Luke and Sarah, then made a quiet retreat to the back deck where Heather rocked on the porch swing.

"I'm giving you fair warning that you're probably going to feel pretty awkward about this all," Sarah said as she took a seat on the sectional sofa in the living room. She wasn't quite what Luke would have expected for an Eranthe, not that he really had a clear picture of what an Eranthe was supposed to look like. She had long curly blonde hair, and wore glasses. She could probably stand to lose about twenty pounds, but at least the jeans and blue t-shirt she wore showed off her curves nicely enough, and she still looked better than the twig girls in Jenn's fashion magazines. Over all, he guessed she was attractive enough if you were into the sexy librarian look.

"I was already assuming that it had to be based on the subject matter alone," Luke said, sitting down in a spot that seemed to be a neutral distance from Sarah. "And not to change the topic too much, but I never really thought of a werewolf still needing glasses before."

"The lycanthropy virus goes back and uses your original DNA as a blueprint for repair jobs. Unfortunately in my case, that blueprint has some flaws in my eye areas. There are some people in the pack who have had good results with Lasik, which takes because of how the laser causes wee burn wounds and all, but the opthamologists I've talked to say I'm just not a good candidate for that kind of eye surgery because of how my eyes are built. That's enough of the unfairness of my life though. So tell me how you met your fiancee," Sarah said, a small encouraging smile on her face.

"It was one of those days where I had to go give testimony over at the county courthouse. My partner and me had pulled over a speeder, and it turned out there were enough drugs in the glove compartment that it was felony level. So we finished our part of the case right before lunch, and ended up in the courthouse cafeteria to get something to eat before reporting back to the station. I looked backward after Owens, he was my partner then, after he made a joke, and there Jenn was standing right behind Owens ordering a sandwich. She smiled at me. I offered to pay for her lunch. She accepted. We sat together and got talking, and it was like everything just clicked between us."

"It's hard for a woman to find a gentleman like that these days," Sarah said as she reached toward him and patted him on the knee brace. "So is she pretty?"

"She's much prettier than a slob like me deserves," he said, starting to relax just a little bit with Sarah. He knew what she was trying to do. She was trying to be friendly with him in order to get him to relax a little. He had done the same thing so many times at work. But better the friendly approach than something more hostile.

"Now when I'm working with you, I want you to think of Jenn, and remember that what I'm asking you to do is as much for her sake as yours."

"I'm not liking the sound of that. So what are you going to make me do?" he said, moving her hand off his knee. He was not surprised when it ended up on his forearm instead, her fingertips brushing against his wrist.

"I'm not going to force you to do anything. Ever since I was eighteen, I've volunteered at rape crisis centers wherever I've lived. I'll always believe that No should mean No. But you're going to want to do as I say because I'm the one who tells Norman and Richard and the rest when I feel like you're ready to be allowed to be alone in the same room with your Jenn."

"And if I don't do what you say?" he said, already knowing the answer that was coming.

"Then you'd learn that you couldn't hide what had happened from us," she said, leaning forward toward his lap until her face was even with his belly button. She inhaled as she briefly closed her eyes, her nostrils flaring as she took the scent of him. "We would still smell her on you, and the smell of her and you mixed together no matter how much you tried to wash it away in the shower. Even in human form, the rest of the pack can tell."

"So what it still comes down to is that someone will hurt me if I don't do what you say. You people sure seem to like those kinds of threats," he said, not happy with how Sarah was still leaning over to sniff his crotch.

"No, what it comes down to is that if you don't do what I say, and you're caught with Jenn, then you're going to hope that the worst thing that happens is that you get your ass kicked." Sarah drew herself up into a sitting position long enough to briefly meet his eyes before she reached down to pull something out of her purse. "We don't run this part of your probation like Raina used to. But there are still things you're going to be asked to do in order to prove to me that you aren't going to hurt the person you love, and that you aren't going to bring the wrong kind of attention to the rest of us. Because this is what happens when you can't keep yourself under control. This is what Louisa's husband looked like after she got through with him."

She passed a pair of photographs to Luke. They were crime scene photos of a man in a pool of blood in a hotel room. If Sarah was trying to shock him, it wasn't working very well. The murder rate was high in St. Louis. He had seen and even helped roll his fair share of victims at work, and very few of them had died pretty. The man had been gutted and had additional claw marks deep across his upper torso. Luke tilted the pictures to see them better in the living room light. He first let his fingertips run across the photos, almost wishing he could reach through them and touch the dead man somehow. Then he found himself tracing the pathways the other wolf had taken with her claws with his own fingernails. He wasn't sure why, but there was just something that felt nice about those small movements.

"Now I want you to imagine Jenn looking like the man in those pictures."

In his mind, he transposed his woman with the man in the photos, and as that mental image became clearer, he found himself quickly passing the pictures back to Sarah.

"Okay, you've made your point. What do you want from me?" He never wanted to do something that hurt Jenn even a little. And what had happened earlier with Heather had scared him. He had gone after her without even thinking about it. What would happen if he tried to move in on Jenn like that? She didn't have Heather's strength or ability to fight back like that.

"Tonight, we're just going to talk for a while. I want to learn some more about you and your relationship with Jenn so that we can work together better."

"Talk, that I think I can do."

"That's good to hear," she said, a small warm smile on her face. "So are you physically intimate with Jenn now, or were you waiting until after the wedding?"

"We make love if that's what you mean. There are still people who wait that long?"

"There are, and it happens more than what you might think. Unfortunately, Louisa and her husband were two of those people, and we feel like we failed them both."

"What do you mean?"

"We should have taught her better how to still control her strength when she was losing control in other ways, and should have made sure that when she got excited that she kept her beast thinking about sex rather than letting it slip into something else. And we should have been there for them, and made sure what serves as a safety net to keep that kind of event from happening was in place."

"You're sounding like Norman when he talks about all the things I'll be feeling after the full moon and that a lot of what he's saying now will make more sense after that." Though he was already starting to feel little bits and pieces of what they all meant. He had never felt anything before like he had felt when Heather had cut herself.

"And a lot of the time, we'd wait until after your first moon to be having this talk. But when someone's got a human significant other, the idea is to get talking earlier because we want both of you to understand the risks you deal with in a physical relationship. Sex leading to death is actually pretty rare these days when a sponsor does their job right, but we also want to prevent other injuries, and to get you both thinking about preventing the accidental spread of lycanthropy."

"That sounds fair. Are those other kinds of problems, as you describe them, rare as well?" He drew his arms around himself, not quite sure what he was trying to do by that until Sarah began to rub his shoulder. Her touch reassured him, let him relax just a little bit during what he felt like was becoming a tense conversation.

"We've talked with other packs. Once one partner in a relationship gets infected with lycanthropy, there's about a twenty percent rate of infection of the other partner as well. Sometimes, the infection is accidental, sometimes the infection is on purpose, and some times it's a case of people figuring they'll just let whatever happen happen."

"Why would you become a werewolf on purpose?"

"Once in a while it's because of something like AIDS. It's something that's actually happened a fair amount among the hyenas in town, or at least that's what the gossip says. If that's not an issue, it comes back to intimacy. It's hard on a relationship when one of the partners is living the life we have to, and the other one is standing on the outside and how we act differently and how we have to keep so much of pack life a secret from even a spouse in order to protect the rest of the pack."

"Like how Norman wouldn't let Jenn come visit me at the clinic?" he said and Sarah nodded. "I didn't like how she couldn't visit, but that just seems like massive overkill to try to fix that problem."

"It's not something I'd want either, but every couple has a different relationship. And speaking of, you've sidetracked me from the questions. Do you feel like the two of you can openly discuss what you do and don't like to do when you have sex?"

"We don't want to overthink it or anything because I feel like you lose the moment if you try to plan everything too much. But over all, I feel like we do. I mean I want her to enjoy everything as much as I do, and I love the way her face looks when it's good for her."

"That's good to hear," she said, the encouraging smile returning. "Do you feel like the two of you can get adventurous when you're in bed together?"

"What do you mean?" he said, looking away from Sarah in order to more carefully study the crack between the couch cushions.

"Do you ever do anything you regard as kinky? Though I can guess from the way you're starting to blush, and the way your heart rate just spiked there."

"Okay, once in a while, we played with my handcuffs a little bit. What's that got to do with anything?"

"Because there are some things that you can do in order to reduce risk, and I'd like to know if I can suggest them right off the bat, or if I felt like I had to work up to offering the suggestion. Sometimes it's pretty straightforward like saying to have the human part of the pair be on top during intercourse because it makes it harder to the wolf to get into a position where they could accidentally crush the human's pelvis. Sometimes it's a little more than that. Wanting to play with your handcuffs once in a while is just another way you can safely vary what the two of you do when you want to be together."

Sarah continued on with the conversation. Luke continued to be red and continued to contemplate the crack between the cushions until Sarah finally sad they had talked as much as they were going to on the subject for the night.

 

"Then what happens after tonight?"

"If you were single, I would have been the first person you'd have sex with since you got infected with lycanthropy. I'd help you work on your control, and if you lost it, I'd heal any damage you caused me. But since we don't want you doing something that would interfere with your relationship with Jenn, I'll come back here a little while after the full moon. We'll go up to the lupanar, and once we're there, you'll have sessions where you learn how to keep your beast under control while you pleasure yourself until you climax."

"What, like in front of you?" He wasn't normally a guy to have performance anxiety, but to have someone watching while he took care of morning wood.

"Norman thought you'd be more comfortable with me there than you would with him there."

"I guess he was right," Luke admitted. He was starting to get more comfortable with the hugs, pats, and touches from the other men in the pack, but that would have still been entirely too gay. "And when you feel like you don't have to watch me anymore?"

"Then we have you and Jenn come to a place that's both romantic and in possession of a safe room in the basement, and after some more counseling, the two of you will be allowed to have supervised intercourse."

"Supervised, as in?"

"The first couple of times, there will be two or three other people in the room with you in order to make sure Jenn stays safe if you have problems controlling your beast. Then it's down to one person for a few more times until we feel really confident of your ability to stay in control."

"So we're talking about us making love in front of a crowd? You're fucking kidding!" He couldn't put Jenn through that kind of humiliation.

"No, I don't kid about fucking. But it's not a crowd. It's the minimum number of observers we feel is necessary to keep Jenn safe, keep you from doing something you'd regret, and keep the pack from drawing the wrong kind of attention from the Missouri legislature. It sounds harsh, but privacy in the pack isn't a right, it's a privilege you're got to earn. Our history shows us it just can't be any other way. And you probably won't believe me right now, but most couples manage to make it all the way through the program. True love doesn't conquer all, but when you pair it up with a good amount of understanding and an acceptance that your feelings about sex might become different than they used to be, it really does go pretty far."

He wondered if Sarah had heard about the way he had acted like he wanted Heather so badly in the kitchen, and if that was what she meant about feelings about sex. He had certainly never felt that way around Jenn before. It was just too weird. And he didn't want to have Jenn feel like she was center stage in a freak show. For a brief moment, he wondered if she would be better off without him. But long ago, and not too long after they had started dating, Jenn had made him promise that he would never make any sort of decision on his own about their relationship where he claimed that it was for her own protection. She had said she had seen too many other cops try to pull their other relationships. And he meant to keep that promise, so he had to tell her what Sarah had said and offer that choice. He had lost so much else in the past few weeks that one of the only things he had left was his own integrity, and he had to keep a tight hold on one of the few things he had left.


	8. Chapter 8

Luke was dead tired, but was utterly failing at falling asleep. There was a tension in the air he just couldn't seem to shake away from. Part of it was probably from his talk with Sarah. He still didn't know how he was supposed to drag Jenn into the kind of world he had found himself shoved into. But there was something beyond that, something else that was feeding into the tension. From his bed, he could see the growing moon out of his bedroom window. Three nights from now, it would be full. Was what he felt now actually part of that, or was it just his own fear finally catching up with himself?

Maybe what he needed was some sort of distraction, he thought as he got out of bed and hobbled his way downstairs. After a stop in the kitchen for a glass of water, he grabbed one of Heather's quilts from the basket next to the sofa, and made himself as comfortable as he could on the sectional. Trying his best not to wake anyone else up, he turned on the television and dialed the volume down to low before he flipped through the channels. Infomerical .... bad sitcom... totally unrealistic crime drama ... bad sitcom ... infomercial... Finally, he stumbled across a somewhat tolerable replay of the World's Strongest Man competitions, managing to do his best not to think about how even those guys wouldn't have had a chance against Van Anders either.

"Not sleeping well? Or at all?" Norman said, pausing just out of Luke's sight at the edge of the living room.

"Not really at all," Luke admitted as he heard Norman grab a quilt of his own.

"If talking would help, or if it wouldn't help," Norman said dropping part of his quilt on the sectional close to Luke, and feeling the need to share that "Heather requests no bare ass on the nice sofa."

Up until that point, Luke had managed to ignore that Norman had gone to bed nude and hadn't bothered to do anything to change that when he had come downstairs. It had helped that the only light in the room had come from the moon and the television set. But he couldn't ignore it anymore as Norman sat down next to him and slid an arm behind his back, wrapping it firmly around Luke's rib cage. He tried to stand up and pull away, but Norman jerked him back onto the sofa. With his free hand, Norman reached over and began to run his fingers through Luke's hair yet again.

"Why do you have to keep doing that?" he grumbled.

"Because it feels nice when it's that short."

"Now that I don't have any reason to keep it that short, maybe I should grow it out if it would stop you from doing that," he said, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice and failing. "And you know you could ease up on the death grip there too. I feel like I've been a good little parolee."

"Not going to run on me, are you?"

"It's not like I've got somewhere else I could go." And just maybe he was starting to be able to admit that it wasn't so bad to feel Norman pressed up against him from hip to shoulder. He felt like he was supposed to scream about Norman being a perv and then take some sort of action to defend his virtue. But to his surprise, what he felt most of all was warm and safe, like it would have finally been okay for him to doze off while leaning up against the other man.

"And right now, you're not sure there's somewhere else you'd want to go," Norman said, giving the hair one last rumpling before putting his hand down.

"What's happening to me?" he said, trying to get himself concerned about Norman's closeness but not quite making it.

"Something that's normal and natural in the process. Wolves are pack animals. From here on out, you're always going to feel better if you're falling asleep with someone else at your back, even if it's a human like Jenn. You know all those stories about how romantic the idea of a lone wolf is?" Luke felt himself nodding at Norman's question. "Well it's obvious that the people who think that aren't one of us because being a lone wolf for any length of time is a giant ball of suck."

"But there's more to it than that." There was something about how he felt that made it seem like cuddling with Jenn wouldn't be the same.

"How do you know?"

"There always is with you. You kept on saying that I'd get the full explanation when I could understand the words you were saying." And now he was starting to really understand what Norman had meant by that. Such a short time ago, he would have kept trying to get away from Norman's embrace instead of finding himself leaning into it and trying to figure out why it felt so comfortable.

"Okay, part two of it is that it's instinctive for us to specifically be drawn to other wolves. Doesn't matter if you like that person or hate them, the physical attraction is going to be there. Don't worry, it's not about sex, and it's considered to be poor manners to even think about having it come to involve sex unless everyone involved wants it to." Norman knew him well enough by now to have a pretty good idea of what he was thinking. "It's a healthy was of strengthening your bond with the rest of the pack."

"You've mentioned bonding with the pack before, and now it's starting to seem like it's more than just getting together on the weekend to watch the game."

"We are pack, and we are one," Norman said in a way that suggested that phrase was common in some way. "Strengthen the bonds among us through closeness and you strengthen the pack as a whole. When we hunt together, you can feel what the other wolves are going to do, how we're all going to approach the prey together. It's a sort of group mind at an instinctual level. Certain alpha shifters can even take that to a different level and speak into the minds of other pack members. Fortunately, we don't have anyone in the pack right now. I've see how it works with the hyenas in town, and it's a little bit creepy. "

"Okay there." He was a little bit relieved that there were things out there that were even too weird for Norman. "Anything else you need to warn me about?"

"Your scent starts to change so that everyone knows you belong to the Thronos Rokke just by your smell."

"I remember it was mentioned in the report we got before we went after Van Anders. I just thought it was another line where the local wolves were trying to convince us it wasn't one of their people."

"We know we're on shaky ground right now in terms of the varmint laws going back before the state legislature. Lying about Van Anders and getting caught would have just made it worse in the public's eye, and I actually like living in the St. Louis area and I don't want to go back to BFE Illinois. You're also starting to feel what I meant when I said that closeness with your own kind helps us heal faster. If you weren't so homophobic and hadn't pushed Neal, Teddy, and me away like you did, your knee probably would have fixed itself by now."

He wanted to protest over Norman's words. It wasn't like he hated queers. It was just that he had his own life and they had theirs, and he had never really felt like there had been a reason for those lives to overlap too much.

"So it's my fault I'm still hurting?"

"To some degree, yes. But until you started to feel and react like a shifter like you are now, there really wasn't a point in me pushing the issue because that part of your beast that registered it as necessary hadn't really come online yet."

"And now it has, and there isn't a way I get to turn it back off again."

"It's never going to go away, but it does settle down over time. If you ever want to talk to a professional about what you're feeling, I can get you in touch with one. A lot of new shifters have problems coming to terms with their violent impulses, the physical intimacy, or both of those things. The people in the pack who are gay or bi will tell you it was actually easier to come to terms with their sexuality than it was to come to terms with how it felt to be a werewolf. If you aren't ready to deal with that yet, you put away the show tunes, stay away from the clubs and keep your pants on, and you can just keep denying it until you're ready to try to accept yourself. But lycanthropy, you've got to come to terms with it on the moon's time frame whether or not you feel like you're ready to. Don't get me wrong. I can think of plenty of people in the pack who carry around quite a bit of self-hate. But you have to start learning how to live with what you've become at some level or you're not going to be able to safely control your beast."

"So a shrink or something like that is supposed to be the answer? When I worked Mobile Reserve, we were supposed to get the once over by the Department's therapist any time we got involved with a major incident, and it seemed like talking with her was totally useless on a good day. Same goes for the psychologist at the hospital who wanted me to talk about the attack."

"I'm not going to make you go see anyone right now, but that offer's on the table if you think need it."

"Thanks, I guess."

"Pack's like family. We're not necessarily the people you would have picked to have in your life. We'll get nasty and fight each other. But when the chips are down, you don't let outsiders hurt one of your own kind, and you do try to look out for your own's best interests."

"If it's really like that, then you're talking about an improvement over my birth family," Luke said, doing his best not to let old emotional wounds reopen. He had managed not to think about them all that much while he was in the hospital, so why were they suddenly bothering him now?

"I noticed that Jenn was the only non-cop who ever really visited you in the hospital, but I figured if you wanted to talk about other family, you'd be the one to bring them up."

"There really isn't much to say other than they think I went and got too good for them just because I had more goals in life than a doublewide and a job as night shift manager at 7-11. "

"Sounds like you had it rough then."

"You know those ivory tower college professors talk about chronic poverty? That was my family. That I know of, I've got thirteen first cousins, two half-brothers, and a sister. A total of three of us managed to graduate from high school, me and my cousins Krystale and Mikey. Mikey's got a decent job in Dallas. He actually called a few times when I was in the hospital to see how I was doing. We've always kind of kept in touch because we were the ones that made it out of there. Krystale joined the Navy and is on a ship somewhere in the Indian Ocean. My parents and the rest of them are still in Kansas City, and never even thought of coming to visit. I'm probably some sort of warning to them now. See what happens when you actually try to make some sort of decent life for yourself. You're just going to get screwed up worse, so there's no need to ever try."

"Granted, my parents weren't happy when I announced I was getting the fuck out of Effingham, but it was nothing like that."

"And then I felt like I never really understood what family could be until I became a cop. I though it was all something made up for the movies or for tv, and that reality was people would just always resent the hell out of the rest of their family. But the other cops, when you talked about looking after your brothers, you meant it, whether it was when you were out on patrol or getting together for a softball game with the firemen or giving all the help you could when someone really needed it. The other guys on Mobile Reserve, the other guys on the force, they still came to the hospital even after they learned about what I was going to turn into just because it was the right thing to do. And that really meant something to me when my own birth family didn't seem to think I was worth caring about." And now he felt like he had lost the first group of people in his life who had actually given a flying fuck about him and had believed in him. Yeah, he had been told he would still be welcome at the bar or the barbecue or the game, but there was a giant wall now between him and the people he had considered to be his friends. He sighed and leaned his face against Norman's shoulder.

"I'm sorry," Norman said, reaching to rub Luke's head again. "I'm not going to bullshit you and tell you you're ever going to replace what you've lost. I mean it's not like you can replace people in your life like you replace light bulbs or something. But you're a good guy, even if you're got some rough edges, and both Heather and I like you, and I'd like for us to stay friends when your probation period is up."

"Thanks." Norman was right. What was being offered didn't replace what he had lost. But at least, it seemed like he had a place he could start over from. He really did feel more at peace and was finally able to doze off for the night, his side still pressed up against Norman's.


	9. Chapter 9

"Sylvie, this is Luke," Norman said as he let the slim, dark-haired woman in the front door.

"Norman's told me a lot about you," he said, talking it a bit slowly as he got off the couch so that he could get a good look at her. At first glance, she didn't look like she was big enough to intimidate. But there was something about the way she moved that suggested she felt confident enough about herself that she didn't have to menace to impress anymore. And heck, Blake was smaller than she was, and Blake was plenty scary even though she was a head shorter than he was.

"And he's been telling me about what's been going on with you as well," Sylvie said as he came to stand in front of her.

Now or never, he thought as he drew in a deep breath. Standing with his legs apart so he wouldn't have to bend his knees as much, he leaned forward until his face was in front of hers. Then, as instructed, he carefully ran his tongue along Sylvie's bottom lip. She smelled like the forest like Norman and Heather did, and tasted like two different kinds of lip balm. It wasn't about sex; it was about power, he found himself thinking. Now where had he heard that one before?

"Nice to see you're learning manners," she said as she pulled back, signaling to him that what he had done was enough.

"I promised Norman I'd be good tonight," he said.

"And after that?" Sylvie said, her voice going low. Before he could respond, she stopped hiding what she was. He felt her power flow around him and then it crashed over him. Dizzy, he found himself grabbing for the wall to keep from falling to the ground in a heap. Then it all eased up around him. The energy pooled around them, no longer pushing at him, but still waiting for something. He straightened his spine, threw his shoulders back, and dropped his hands away from the wall as he carefully kept his eyes on Sylvie's left elbow. Hopefully, he was managing to show he was respectful without seeming like he was a total doormat.

"I don't want to cause trouble with you, or anyone else unless they start something first," he said.

"Fair enough," she said, giving him a small smile that had a bit of real warmth to it.

Then Heather swooped in to offer drinks and snacks, they moved back into the living room, and for a little while the conversation took a lighter turn as Sylvie talked about a bunch of people he hadn't met yet with Neal, Norman, and Heather. He had just started to relax a little when Sylvie turned her attention on him again.

"So why did you decide to become a police officer?" she asked.

"Do you all have to take those career aptitude tests back in junior high?" he began.

"What, the ones that were always a joke because they'd tell you to either be a fast food cook or a brain surgeon?" Neal said.

"Yeah, those tests. I always knew I wanted to do better in life than my parents did, but I didn't really know how to do that. So we got the results back and it said I should think of being a plumber, police, or a firefighter. I didn't want to spend my life messing with other people's shit, so plumber was right out. Then when I was in high school, they had this police explorers program for a bunch of kids from the ghetto, and a bunch of kids from the trailer park, and I got to be a part of that."

"And you decided it was going to be a job that you'd love?" she asked. She was starting to sound like the screener from the psych interview he'd had to go through when he applied to the police academy.

"Don't know if I'd call it love, but it seemed like there was a lot to like about the job, and the pay and benefits were good enough that my wife wouldn't have to work when I got married."

"You didn't strike me as one of those keep 'em barefoot and pregnant guys," Neal said as Luke drew sharp looks from both Sylvie and Heather.

"I'd never tell Jenn she had to quit or anything. I'm proud of her and the work she does. But the women where I grew up, you'd see them and they've got two kids too little for school yet, and a belly out to there," he said gesturing to give the impression of a pregnant woman just about to term, "and they've just spent ten hours on their feet working at the grocery store or the diner or the warehouse, and that look in their eyes. They're tired to the point where it's like they're half dead already. I wanted something better for my wife than that."

"Why not the military?" Sylvie asked.

"What, because it's supposed to be the place that poor kids go to get out? Because everyone knew that the recruiters lied to you. They'd promise you a hundred and one different things, and then a year later, you find out you're stuck in Alaska or Canada or Greenland or something freezing your ass off outside in the snow for the next three years. "

"Okay, but why not firefighter then?"

"Because when you really learn about the job, most of it these days is being a paramedic and shit, and I didn't want to deal with people puking or bleeding on me on a regular basis. DUI's puking in the back of my squad car once in a while is bad enough."

"Did you ever think of going for detective?" she asked, staring intensely at his face. He kept his eyes down and his body carefully stiff. He didn't want to challenge her, but he wasn't going to just roll over in front of her and offer up his belly to her either.

"I liked being a beat cop. But Jenn and I were talking about it a little for after we got married. Detective's a less dangerous job because you're not doing traffic stops or walking the streets like the beat cops do."

"How did she feel about you being part of Mobile Reserve?"

"She used to say she was less worried when we got the call to go out for that because at least we knew something was coming our way, and could get ourselves ready for that, unlike getting a gun pulled on you when you pulled someone over for speeding. I think she'd say something different about Mobile Reserve now," he said, protectively pulling his arms around his gut before he even realized what he was doing. Norman slid closer to where he sat, his arms and body surrounding Luke until his warmth spread over the cold spots where the claws had gone in. He took a deep breath, and let what had tensed up start to relax just a little bit.

"So why did you get into Mobile Reserve to begin with?"

"I was good on the range, and they were looking for snipers at the time. Then even if you've got a specialty on the squad, you cross train to do a bunch of other things so that everyone knows what to do in different situations. "

"Ever shoot anyone?" The question came direct and blunt.

"I never fired my weapon in the line of duty. Drew it yes, plenty of times, but never discharged. Believe it or not, even in St. Louis it's pretty common for police to go their entire careers without doing that. Even when we were perched on the rooftops in some sort of fucked up hostage situation, there was almost always some other way to solve the problem."

"Do you think you could have?" she said, really asking him if he though he had it in him to kill.

"If I had to, I think I could have. If you're at the point where the gun come out of the holster, you're doing that because you're thinking that there's someone out there that's going to hurt innocent people, and I couldn't let that happen."

Sylvie went on to ask more questions about his life as a police officer. It was hard to read how she felt about what he said, but then the other shifters he'd met in the past few days knew how to keep their feelings tight to themselves as well.

"Last question. Suppose you knew a crime had been committed in the pack. Your Ulfric tells you to stay quiet about it to outsiders, that the matter will be handled internally, and that the one responsible will be punished by us. Would you go against him, and report what happened to your old friends?"

Luke opened his mouth, then shut it again as he discovered that the answer wasn't as easy as it had used to be.

"You know, I don't really know anymore. Mob rules and vigilante justice, I've seen things go horribly wrong because of that when I worked the riots after Addison v. Clark years ago. People thinking that the laws shouldn't apply to them anymore just because they didn't like a court decision. It was just out and out ugly, an no one should be allowed to do that. But then Norman will talk about how the lukoi had their laws in place two thousand years before the Declaration of Independence, and how those laws worked to keep people safe for the most part. And I can't help but think about how if the wolves had cleaned up their own mess instead of getting RPIT and the rest of us involved then I wouldn't be here right now."

"I'm glad you're honest. And it's a sign of character that you don't just go and change your loyalties on a whim. But you need to understand what you are now, and how human law doesn't always work for us, for you," she said.

He was about to ask her what she meant when she let go of her shields again. This time, the power had a darker edge to it. Norman had said she would do anything to protect her pack, and if he wouldn't agree to keep pack secrets, then he would be considered to be a threat to the pack. Everything about her, from the look in her eyes to the set of her shoulders to the way her energy now crashed up against him trying to overwhelm, him, suggested that she would have no problem dealing with anything she thought was a threat.

Fight or run, his own beast demanded as it came awake in response. Fight or run, or she would eat them. But he couldn't fight. He still wasn't strong enough to even challenge Heather, much less someone who was Heather's protector. He wouldn't have a chance against Sylvie. And he couldn't run. His leg felt better for now, but who knew just how well it would stand up if he tried to flee? And she was probably faster than him just like she was stronger than him.

Fight or run or submit. He wouldn't do that, couldn't do that, a little part of his mind insisted even as he found himself slipping down off the couch. But the power kept crashing up against him, pushing and pulling at his beast until he almost couldn't stand it anymore. As he found himself crawling toward Sylvie, he reminded himself about how Heather had said he wasn't going to be the rookie forever. He could do this for now and then work his way up through the ranks later.

He reached Sylvie still on his hands and knees, his face coming to rest against her denim-clad knee. As he bent his neck to offer his throat, he picked up a scent from between her legs, the lip balm he had tasted earlier. She bent at the waist until her mouth was against his jugular, then gave his skin two quick licks before sitting up straight again.

"Tell me what that was," she said as she rubbed her palm against his cheek. "Or at least tell me what you think it was. The humans would have tried to say that I used my magic, that I somehow compelled you to come to me. And they could try to charge me under human laws for what they saw as me using that kind of magic. But the truth is that no normal human would have felt anything from me. All that I did was to drop the shields around me. The reason that you reacted like you did was because you aren't a normal human anymore. You are lycanthrope, and have become sensitive enough to your own kind by now that you can tell when you should act with caution. Do you understand better now?"

"I do," he managed to whisper, his voice sounding rougher than it normally did as the beast inside of him slowly began to relax under Sylvie's touch. She had accepted his offer of submission, and by doing so, had offered her own protection. That made his beast feel safe. His beast. She was right. There were things that were happening to him that human law could never explain or understand.

"The laws of the lukoi are for the protection of all. There will always be good reasons for what we ask of you. And as you have seen, we are willing to work with the human authorities when we find it to be appropriate. We worked with them to kill Van Anders. We have given over others in the pack to face human justice when they have committed crimes under human law."

"I remember some of those cases." There had been one particularly messy domestic violence and divorce case involving a werewolf about six months back that had turned out to be the talk of the department for days afterwards.

"Has your answer to the question changed?" she asked, her fingertips trailing along his jawbone.

"I want to always try to do the right thing. Now I'm starting to feel like the right thing might now always be what human law says it would be," he said. "But if it's a case where lukoi law would let someone get away with something when human law would appropriately punish the person, then all bets are off."

"Don't worry. We're very good at policing our own these days," she said. Even though he had only just met her, there was something deep inside of him that made him want to believe her when she said that.

"Car turning into the driveway," Norman interrupted from the corner as he went to peek out the window. "Looks like it's Jenn."

"Time for you to get up and introduce me to her then," Sylvie said as she moved her hand from his face to run it briefly through his hair. Why was it that his hair seemed so fascinating to other wolves, he wondered as he carefully got himself to his feet with a slight assist from Sylvie.

"And it all changes gears just like that?" he asked as Heather began to restock the chips and relish tray.

"Just like that. You do what you have to do to make it all seem human enough," Neal said.

Because they felt like they had to pretend to be something other than what they were in front of Jenn. Because Jenn wasn't one of their own like he was, she couldn't be trusted to really understand it all. As much as he hated to admit it, he was starting to understand why they all felt that way. As he tried to process it all, Norman was letting Jenn inside the house, and introductions were made in a way that made Sylvie seem like nothing more than the All-American girl from next door.

"So how was my future nephew's birthday party?" he asked her as she gave him a peck on the cheek.

"Extremely wired on too much sugar from all the ice cream and cake," she said with a chuckle. "But him and his friends seemed to be having a grand old time. And most of the adults there seemed glad to hear you were out of the hospital."

"Most of them?" he said as they settled onto the short side of the sectional sofa.

"Yeah. You know my family. Three quarters of them either still think you're great husband material, or at least they're holding their peace well enough about our engagement, and the last quarter of them are going to find some reason why they don't think you're good enough for me. It's almost the same exact ratio it was before you got cut up."

"Everything that's going on right now, it's nice to know that some things don't change," he said. For the most part, he liked Jenn's family. They had given him a window into what a normal happy family was supposed to be like, and it was clear that they sufficiently adored Jenn.

"That they don't. I don't think Nanna's changed her mind on anything or anyone since 1993. So what's the plan for the more grown up part of my Saturday here?"

"Movies and stuff on the grill," Norman said. "With the full moon tomorrow, we wanted to keep it pretty mellow for everyone tonight."

"And I was promised comedies. Real life's got enough drama to it that I don't need any of the fictional variety," Sylvie said as the rest of the wolves took seats on the long part of the couch. To his surprise, Luke felt a brief flash of jealousy as the way Norman seemed so comfortable as he more or less settled into Neal's lap. Then Neal was reaching across the corner to rub one of his arms, and he found himself feeling happily content to have his pack on one side of him and his mate on the other side of him.

**********************************

"Can we talk, just you and me?" Jenn asked as the credits for Sylvie's pick, Cannonball Run, rolled across the television screen.

"It's still nice enough for the porch swing out back," Norman offered, indicating that Luke's bedroom was off limits for the two of them. He had gone from being treated like a three year old to being treated like a horny fifteen year old with his first girlfriend. Luke supposed it could be considered to be some sort of progress.

"And it's good to get some more fresh air," Luke said as he led her out to the backyard, shutting only the screen of the slider behind him. He knew the rest of the wolves were going to be watching him. Better to have the illusion that he had some sort of control in the whole matter rather than having one of them open up the door behind him as a matter of course.

Jenn stopped just before they got to the swing, drawing him in the same firm but careful embrace.

"I don't know if you're still hurting down there, but I just feel like I've got to squeeze you tight and let you know I don't want to let you go again. I also want to do this," she said, pressing even closer until her lips locked against his, and her tongue licked across his teeth looking to go even deeper.

It was the first time she had really kissed him as a lover since the attack. He kissed back, letting his tongue entwine with her own just as he hugged her tight in return. He could feel her nipples perk up as the pressed against him, and could feel himself start to get warm and hard as the kiss continued. He loved how she held him so wonderfully tight, and would love it even more if he could tear her capris off her body and force her to the ground, her ass in the air and her wrists held down firm so that she couldn't get away from him no matter how much wonderful fear and struggle there was.

The violence of his fantasy made him sharply pull back away from her even as his breath came heavy from the excitement of the images.

"Luke?"

"It got all too intense on me there for a second. I just need to calm down for a minute."

They took careful seats on the swing, not too far apart, but not as close to each other as they had been on the couch earlier.

"Better now? Luke, what's going on with you?"

"It's like everything's suddenly more intense. I mean I really wanted to jump your bones right here and now."

"And is that such a bad thing?"

"It could be. The pack doesn't want a repeat of the Louisa Baldwin incident, so I've been told I'm not allowed to have sex until they think I'm ready for it."

"And you're going to do, or not do just that?"

"I told them I'd be a good little wolf and do what I'm told for now."

"You're different around these people than you usually are around people you've just met. I've known you a while now, and you're usually pretty cynical. Takes you a long time to trust or believe in other people. But it's like all of a sudden you're all buddy-buddy with Norman and Heather and the rest, and it's just weird to watch. It's like you're a whole different person now." She looked him in the eyes like she wanted to see through them and into his brain.

"I don't feel entirely different. I think I'm still mostly me. But it's like I'll never be exactly like I was ever again. Everything smells different and tastes different now. It's like all my instincts are different than they used to be, and I'm feeling stuff inside of me that I didn't know I could ever feel. And the pack are the people who came along and who can help me adjust to everything that's changing inside of me. I trust them because they've had the same thing happen to them, and because I can tell they've been honest to me so far. Funny how now I can tell when someone's lying and when someone's telling the truth, and that's when they kick me out of the police."

"So what did they tell you to scare you away from me?"

"They showed me pictures of Louisa's husband, and told me to picture your face there. And then I knew I had to play by their rules because I never want something like that to ever happen to you. I love you too much to let that happen, even if it ends up driving you away from me. At least you'd still be alive."

"So what are their rules then?"

He told her what Sarah told him about werewolf sex ed, and how they would want to feel like he was in control of his beast before he would be allowed to be with her again.

"I guess if we dove under enough covers, we could almost pretend they aren't there," Jenn started to think aloud as she went over what he had said.

"Apparently covers are right out. They want to be able to see my hands so they can make sure I'm not about to claw you up."

"So what is it then? Just a bare mattress and a bunch of people staring at us?"

"I'm not sure if it makes you feel any better, but the wolves I've met all seem to be pretty good at being able to politely ignore something they're staring directly at."

"It doesn't make me feel better now. So how much time do I have to get used to the idea of performing before an audience?"

"Either six or ten weeks, depending on how happy they are with my ability to keep control of my beast when I'm stressed or excited. And you, my dear, definitely make me excited."

Jenn reached up to run her fingers along his face, and it was everything he could do not to close his eyes in bliss and ask her to scratch behind his ears as well.

"You know just when there's all this going on with you that I don't understand, then you get this little look on your face where it's like you're telling you how much you love me, and it makes me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world."

"But you are the most beautiful woman in the world. I'm not gonna lie to you about that either."

"But you will flatter, my love. And it's the kind of thing that makes me want to keep trying to make it work with you, because I love you too, no matter how weird it gets with you."


	10. Chapter 10

The full moon was rising in the twilight sky. Luke could feel it even though the clouds had rolled in that afternoon, blanketing the view of space from Earth even as the rain from them lightly plinked down on Heather's station wagon.

"Is there any way you can get some of the A.C. headed more toward the back seat? I'm feeling really warm back here."

"Right now, a blast of cold air would only end up making you feel worse," Heather said from the driver's seat as she slowed down to make a right turn onto a county road on the outer suburban fringes of St. Louis. "Want me to turn on the radio instead? Find some of your favorite tunes to listen to?"

"Nah, that's okay." What he really wanted at that moment was to open the window, to taste and smell fresh air instead of leather seats and engine oil, but it was raining just enough that he didn't want it to mess up Heather's car. What he needed was to get out of the stink of machine and have the smell trees and fields all around him as he hunted for the scent of something livelier. He had been restless all day, and it had only gotten worse until it felt almost like the steel surrounding him was starting to shrink down to crush him. He needed to get out of the car, and out of it soon. He tried to move just an inch or two closer to the freedom promised by the window, but the seatbelt held him taut, the edge of it carving a line along his stomach.

Pain from inside of him suddenly erupted to match the pain along his skin. He felt the pain of Van Anders' claws tearing at his gut all over again, this time coming from inside of him rather than slicing through his skin. He pulled his arms in front of himself instinctively and then began to double over until his forehead connected with the head rest in front of him. The wolf wanted out, and wanted out right now. It wanted out of the seat belt, our of the car, out of him, and it didn't care how much it hurt him as it got out. The pain in his gut didn't let up at all, but was instead joined by shooting pain in his joints as the wolf tried to twist his bones into something that could run on four legs instead of two.

"Breathe," the command came from Norman as he scooted across the back seat to wrap arm and body around Luke. "Inhale and exhale for me. Inhale and exhale."

He tried to follow Norman's commands as he fought back the wolf. To his surprise, each breath seemed to help him ease back on the pain inch by inch.

"Good boy," Norman said as he rubbed a hand across Luke's shoulder and arm. "Control one automatic action like breathing, and it helps you keep everything else in control as well."

He pushed the wolf back until he was left with a dull ache in his joints. It wasn't going to go away entirely tonight. He could feel the wolf waiting, still needing so badly to run free. But at least he had bought himself a little more time even though fighting it had left him far more tired than he would have thought. He found himself slumping up against Norman, tensed muscles relaxing to let man and bench seat support him.

"Thanks," he managed to say to Norman when he finally felt able to talk again.

"Can't have you shifting back here and fucking up the upholstery. Now if Heather would have gotten the Element like I thought she should have, there wouldn't have been that worry. You can hose the inside of those down when they get dirty."

"But they're hideously ugly," Heather said as she turned down a dirt road. "No way would I ever drive something that looks like that. And Sylvie said that according to all the insurance tests, the Subaru was the best car in my price range for hauling stuff around."

"You'd think they were already married from they way they are together, wouldn't you?" Neal said from the front passenger seat. His voice had gone lower and lower all day long as the sun allegedly made its way across the sky behind the clouds.

"If we couldn't already talk like that with each other, I wouldn't be marrying him," Heather said as she now parked the car near what looked like an aging but well-kept farmstead. There were already many more cars scattered throughout the area wherever they could find space among high grass and trees. "Anyone want one of those dollar store rain ponchos? I've got a stash in the glove compartment."

"We'll be okay back here," Norman said. Luke felt a flash of irritation that the other man had spoken for him, even if there was no way he wanted to put some other layer of fakeness between himself and what was out there. He needed to feel what was real- the wind and rain brushing up against him on an Indian summer day. He fumbled at the door handle, feeling a hard flash of anger when he discovered that Heather still had the rear door child locks flipped on. He needed to get out of the car now, even if he had to climb over Neal in the process.

"We can't have you go bolting out into the woods on us just yet," Neal said. " People are tense right now because we've had to fight off so many threats to the pack lately, and the usual hotheads are hair-trigger enough to try to maul any outsiders first and ask questions later. And right now, you still smell like an outsider. So stick close to your sponsor Norman and let him do the introducing tonight. Understood?"

"Understood." He was at the point where he was ready to promise anyone anything if they would just let him out of the damn car.

Finally, after another ten seconds that seemed like a year, he heard the soft click of the back seat door lock and saw the knobs poke up through the door frame. As fast as he could, he opened the door and darn near threw himself on to the short grass, the wet dirt squishing in between his bare toes. After he shut the door, he leaned against the car, drawing in a deep breath of the fresh air surrounding him.

He was surrounded by life. He smelled pine and osage orange and honeysuckle and thistle. He could darn near taste the dogwood and the other people talking and laughing in the clearing. Make that the other wolves in the clearing. They weren't doing anything to hide or shield their power, which would made it unmistakably obvious what they were even if you somehow missed how they smell. He watched a flock of chickadees flirt from treetop to treetop, the growing wolf in him wishing that the birds would come low enough to the ground that he could somehow chase the life out of them. He just had to track something, and there were too many other people around the cars for the land-based prey to come close.

"Ready?" Norman said as he came around the car to stand next to Luke, grabbing him lightly on the elbow. It was just the right amount of contact- close but not enough to restrain him from running when he had to.

"If I'm not, there isn't much anyone can do about it, is there?"

"Not really," Norman admitted as he watched Heather wave Sylvie and a blonde woman toward them. Great. The last thing he wanted to do right now was to go through that whole interrogation all over again. Picking up on Luke's distress, Norman gave his elbow a squeeze. "But at least you've got friends to look after you. Normal greeting with Sylvie and Gwen if that's what you want."

"So you're Gwen," he said after he was introduced to the blonde, and all the right cheek-rubbing formalities were observed. "I've heard nice things about you. Thanks for getting Jenn in touch with that wolves' wives support group. I think she's feeling a little overwhelmed too with everything going on with us right now."

"Normal for her to be feeling that way. It really is hard for the human spouses, and those kinds of groups generally seem to help deal with the stress of it all."

"Hey, no getting my girlfriend into shop talk tonight," Sylvie said as everyone moved around to finish off the greeting cycle.

"No offense meant," he said.

"I know. I just want her to have a little bit of time here and there where she isn't thinking of work," Sylvie said, moving her face from his to brush her cheek hard against his neck and upper chest. "You don't smell like pack right now, but if you at least smell more like me, it gets the message through to the usual hotheads that you've got my support for being here."

"Ummm, thanks," he mumbled, feeling a little like he had somehow been adopted by her.

"A lot of people have put a lot of work into getting you this far. Can't have all that effort being wasted, can we?" she said, and then before Luke could ask her what she meant by that, the two women were being waved over into conversation with a group getting out of a pickup truck across the way.

A wolf howled in close range, the sound of the beast sending shivers down Luke's spine. Van Anders had sounded like that, letting out that kind of yell as he had left Luke dying in the hallway. Now there were others here right now that would slice him up like Van Anders had. He could feel claws digging into him all over again, his skin feeling tiny sharp pains almost like he had fire ants in turn trying to claw their way out of them.

"Luke, breathe," Norman's command came again, and he did his best to follow the instruction. For now, he was supposed to obey the other man, and it felt oddly right to comply with his orders. For the second time that night, he slowly managed to pull it all back in.

"Still breathing and still standing," he finally said, his own wolf pulled just back underneath the surface. "It's just that the only time I've ever really seen a werewolf, you know, I pretty much ended up dead."

"And we didn't want you to be in close range to another wolf when they shifted when you haven't had your first full moon yet. The other wolf can throw off enough energy when they shift that the magic can try to pull you along into changing into wolf form as well. But if your beast isn't quite formed yet, and you aren't quite ready to change yet, it can screw you up and throw you into shock, and we definitely didn't want that happening."

"So it wasn't just another one of those 'you'll know it when you're a grown-up' deals?"

"Nope, there were actual physical reasons. If that wasn't a concern, then we would have gone somewhere where you would have seen it was possible to have someone shift near you and not kill you. You were spooked enough that it probably would have helped to see that. Now let's get you up to the lupanar then so you can go through the formalities with Richard, and after that, it'll be time to stop fighting back the shift and just letting it happen when it happens."

"Is it going to hurt?" he said, asking one of the questions he had been avoiding since the test results had come back.

"It's always going to hurt in some way, but over time there's either less of the pain, or you just learn how to notice it less. Now it's time to move," Norman said, slapping Luke lightly on the leg, his fingernails catching against the fabric of Luke's cutoff shorts. Luke didn't care for the idea of wearing clothes he knew he was going to destroy before the night was over. He had grown up with little enough that he hated to waste even the most threadbare clothing from his, Norman's and Neal's closet combined. But there was even less of a chance that he would go charging naked through the woods in front of a couple hundred strangers.

The four of them made their way on a pathway between the impromptu parking lot and to something, well something in the woods that seemed to be restless and watching him.

"You feel them?" Neal said. Luke hadn't been aware that he had spoken out loud.

"Feel who?"

"The ones that have come before us, and who now watch over this place," Norman said. "We bury the bones of our dead out here, and parts of some of them stay behind to look out for the living. It's why about twenty years ago, the pack set things up with the state so that the lupanar is a permanent conservation and nature preserve area. We couldn't let ourselves get pushed into a position where we were forced to sell the land for subdivisions. It would be like someone building a house on top of your grandma's grave. "

"And it doesn't creep you out that something's just out there?"

"After a while, you just kind of get comfortable around most of them," Norman said.

"What do you mean by most of them?"

"Raina's still around sometimes, and she can be as unpleasant in death as she was in life."

"Hold it there. I'm not going any further," he said, putting both his feet down squarely in the moss.

"Yes, you are. Because you need to go meet Richard. If you don't go ask for his protection before everyone shifts, you're considered to be a rogue wolf invading our territory, and you'd very likely end up dead. And if you wanted to die somewhere along the line, giving up in the hospital would have been a whole lot less painful than getting torn apart here," Norman said.

"Okay, point taken," he sighed, leaning against Norman as he began to walk forward again. He didn't like what was going on, but he had made a choice about the direction his life was going to take, and it was apparently too late to back out of that decision now. He wasn't ready to give up on life just yet, couldn't for both his own and Jenn's sake. At least Norman was there to watch his back for him.

After what seemed like a forever of small steps down too narrow paths, they finally made it to a large clearing amid the trees. The people already gathered there were still in human form. The wolf he had heard earlier and could almost smell still was nowhere to be seen. He started to make a more thorough visual survey of the scene. He recognized Anita Blake standing next to a trio of short blonde men, and wondered why she was there. She wasn't a werewolf; that he could definitely tell now. And of all the people there, she was the only one dressed in anything other than something out of the rag bag. She wore all black from her shirt to her jeans to her socks and running shoes. Her gun holsters and knife sheaths were worn over her clothes like she meant to show off how heavily she was armed. Over it all, she wore a clear plastic slicker. Good to see that she wasn't exposing her weapons to the rain, he thought.

"Anita holds the rank of Bolverk in the pack. She's also our current lupa." Heather said, noticing where he was looking.

"But unless I'm totally missing something, she's human, and I thought you had to be a wolf for that to happen," he said.

"How that happened is a long story that I don't feel like getting into tonight," Neal said, making it sound like he wasn't entirely happy with the story. "Better to look the other way and head toward Richard over there."

His eyes followed where Neal pointed. Richard from the clinic stood on the other side of the clearing near a large limestone outcropping, looking relaxed as he talked to a pair of women nearby. His posture was in contrast to the body language of the black man and the Asian man that stood on either side of him screamed bodyguard. Norman had said the wolves tended to be an integrated, equal opportunity lot, he found himself thinking as Norman prodded him toward the wolf king. He had to distract himself somehow because he couldn't do what he was supposed to do if he let himself think about it too much.

Finally, he stood in front of Richard. He took a deep breath, trying to let go of the tension on the exhale. It seemed to work a little bit. He had always been a long term planner, he reminded himself. He had put up with a lot of short term bullshit in order to reach the ultimate goal of making it our of the trailer park. He could do this too, or at least make it look like he was playing along.

"I stand outside in the winds and come to ask for shelter with the Thronos Rokke Clan," he said, starting to cover the script that Norman had made him memorize. With one more deep breath, he lightly kissed Richard on each cheek, then moved on to Richard's mouth, running his tongue over Richard's lower lip. At least the wolf king had good oral hygiene, he found himself thinking as he did his best to try to not think about how he was kissing another man.

Then he felt the rush of Richard's power wash over him. It was easily ten times stronger than what he had felt from Norman when Norman had smacked him down. In an instant, his own wolf jumped inside him, and instead of just going through the motions, his deference to the wolf king turned startlingly real in an instant. He took a step back from Richard and went down on his knees, his head tilted to one side to expose his throat in order to show he didn't want a fight that night. He looked up at Richard, careful not to make eye contact as he waited for Richard to decide what happened next.

"What is your name?"

"Luke Joel Bates."

"Will you promise to obey the laws of the lukoi?"

"I promise I will."

"Do you promise to keep our secrets from any and all outsiders?"

"I promise I will." He meant it. The other wolves would know it if he didn't. But he wasn't entirely comfortable with it, and couldn't help but wonder just how much illegal shit he had just agreed to.

"Do you promise to use all possible effort to learn to control your beast so you are not a danger to yourself and others?"

"I promise I will." because there was no way in hell he wanted to turn into a monster like Van Anders.

"Then you are granted my own protection, and are welcome to hunt with us tonight," Richard said, offering Luke a hand to pull him back to his feet.

"Thank you," he said as Richard drew him into a hug before rubbing his face against Luke's cheeks, chest, and shoulders. It was weird. He felt relief that things had gone well with Richard, which could be expected. But that new part of him almost felt happy at the provisional acceptance into the pack, groveling and all. So that was what Norman had meant when he had talked about the need for them to stick with others of their own kind.

"Get the scent of the pack leadership on you, and everyone else here will know you're allowed to be here, even if they're not able to think as humans at the moment," Richard said in explanation as he finished up the rubbing and pulled away from Luke. Not able to think as human. Norman had said that it was how it was for the first few months for new wolves when they shifted, and now he wasn't far from that happening to him too.

"Jamil," the black man said, his body relaxed slightly from when Luke had approached Richard.

"Good to meet you," he said politely as Jamil repeated the face rubbing along his upper body.

"Same here. Though why we need any more ex-cops, I'm not quite sure," he said with humor in his voice.

"Yeah, well then see who drags your furry black ass to safety when we get caught up in the next inevitable St. Louis mess," the Asian man replied, a small smile on his lips. "I'm Shang-Da. Once long ago, I spent a couple years with the San Francisco PD."

"All the way out to California and then you moved back here?" he asked. He wasn't sure if he could have come back from the land of palm trees to the land of ice and snow.

"I wanted to be closer to family," the man said as he added his scent to Luke's body.

A dozen questions for the other former police danced through Luke's head, but before he could ask any of them, the pain shot through his gut yet again. The part of him that could register something other than the pain heard Norman urge him to breathe and to relax as much as he could as he lightly wrapped his arms around Luke. He felt something ripple along his legs just before he blacked out.

When he came to, he was laying on wet gravel, his head in Norman's lap, the ache in his joints growing stronger again.

"It didn't happen yet?" he managed, surprised that he was able to manage the words relatively calmly.

"Not yet, but very soon now." Norman said. This time, Luke was actually glad for the reassuring hand running through his hair .

"God help me, but I'm starting to almost wish it would happen now so I could get it all over with," he said, wondering if curling up in a ball on his side would make the pain better or worse. He tried to relax his breathing, and managed to refocus enough that he heard bits and pieces of Richard's speech to the assembled crowd as he sat on the stone outcropping.

"We were challenged by one who sought to undermine everything Thronos Rokke stood for. But we were strong, and our Bolverk killed the one who threatened us," Richard said as cheers went up for Anita Blake. In a moment of intuitive clarity, he began to suspect she was the one who had killed Raina. "And we also continue to repair the damage the rogue caused. We are vigilant. We have shown that we will destroy the enemy that enters our territory. We are the Thronos Rokke, and no other wolf shall pass through our lands without our leave!"

There was more cheering as Richard rallied his troops. Guy could turn it on when he wanted to, Luke thought. Then he felt the power begin to flow all around him, pushing its way through him. Not too far away from him, a nude man doubled over, and dark fur began to errupt from his back through some sort of liquid mess. He felt the claws rip through his gut all over again in a way that he couldn't do anything to shield himself from what attacked him.

"Let it come, this time, let it come," Norman said softly, his fingers still rubbing Luke's buzz cut.

He couldn't really hear much of anything else after that as the pain overwhelmed him. The energy continued to wash through him, including some part of it that he could identify as Norman. Then something inside of him rose up to join in the swirl of power, the feel of it all overwhelming him so much that his mind tripped like a circuit breaker and everything went dark again.


	11. Chapter 11

Was it supposed to feel this good? Luke thought as he slowly woke up the following morning. For the first time since the attack, he truly felt at peace. The two nights he had spent dozing on the couch while slumped up against Norman had only really taken the edge off it all. Now, he was finally really warm enough, and finally really safe enough while he was surrounded by pack. As he breathed deeply, he could smell the other wolves all around him, some of them strangers, some of them becoming more and more familiar. His eyes still closed, Luke began to sort out the people around him. He was curled up on one side of Heather, and there was another woman on the other side of him, along with a man who was using Luke's thigh as a pillow. One of Luke's arms draped across Heather so that he could keep in touch with Norman on the other side of her.

And right now, that draping arm included one hand that was resting on Norman's bare ass.

As soon as he realized where that hand was, he quickly jerked it back toward him, his eyes opening wide and his whole body shuddering as he did. In the process, he kicked the man leaning against his legs, his heel connecting with the man's back. He tried to untangle himself from the other wolves so he could stand up and get away from the guy he had been groping, but Norman's own arm shot out and pressed him back against the floor of the barn. He assumed it was the barn he had caught a glimpse of the night before.

"Easy there, Luke. You don't really want to go anywhere right now do you?" Norman said in his best calming dogs and small children voice.

"What I don't want to do is to play grab ass with you," he said.

"I figured as much," Norman said as he carefully repositioned Luke's arm so that it fell along Heather's stomach and Norman's rib cage instead. "Now is that better?"

"Much better." It was also a little bit weird to have his naked self curled up next to Heather's own naked self. But if there was something wrong about that, Norman certainly would have done something about it by now.

"Good. Now just follow your instincts and go back to sleep for a little while. Let yourself enjoy how it feels when the whole pack gathers together in the barn here after a full moon. It's always even better when the day after falls on a Saturday or a Sunday like it did this time."

"Why's that?" he asked, even as he gave into Norman's request and let his mind begin to drift back to sleep again.

"Weekdays, you get some of the alphas all in charge of making sure that the eight to five people get woken up in time for them to be into work on schedule. Weekends, everyone actually gets to not only sleep in long beyond what you need to do to recover from the shift, you also usually even have time to go out for brunch afterwards. It's good stuff."

"Are we having brunch?" he asked. He wasn't hungry yet, but he felt like he would be soon, and he had gotten a dozen lectures already about how breakfast was such an important meal for werewolves.

"Yeah. I know a great place on the way home. Killer omelets, and Heather loves their french toast too."

"Sounds good," he mumbled as he closed his eyes to better doze.

The next time he woke up, it was because more people were starting to move all around him. As he watched, people began to get up off the floor where they had slept, many of them laughing or joking about things that had happened during the night. Luke briefly tried to remember anything that had happened after Norman had told him to stop fighting the change at the lupanar, but the only memory he had seemed to be the scent of pine trees, streams, and food.

"Hey, mystery wolf," The man who had been sleeping against Luke's leg had woken up, and was sniffing at Luke as he squinted at his face. He had pale skin, dark hair, and a goatee.

"I'm Luke," he offered, not quite sure if more formal introductions were in order.

"New I take it. You smell like a new guy, kind of like you've gotten that first coat of pack scent painting on you, but you've got more coats of it to go yet."

"Yeah." In some weird way, the other man's description made sense.

"I'm Jason Keizer. Not to be confused with Jason Richatelli, Jason Harris, or Jason Wong. Definitely not to be confused with Jason Schuyler. There's a lot of Jasons in the pack, so I've got to be specific. Only one other Luke right now though."

"Good to meet you," he said to that one of the Jasons.

"Same here. And with saying that, It's time for me to hit the road," Jason said, rubbing his hand briefly along Luke's shin before getting to his feet. "Gotta get home to the wife. I promised her I'd spend a good amount of time this weekend working on the kids' playhouse since the rain was going to stop and the weather was going to be nice."

Jason walked out of Luke's field of vision and was replaced by Norman, who then bent down to give Heather a kiss and to give Luke a pat on the shoulder.

"Just slipped away to grab you some shorts. I figured you'd probably still be more comfortable when you got up if you had them when we're heading back out to the car." Norman said as he passed a bundle of fabric to Luke.

"Thanks. " He wasn't quite sure about how to deal with the large number of hugging naked people in the barn. The shorts were definitely appreciated in that regard.

"So much of what's gone on ends up pushing far outside your comfort zones. If there's something little that can actually make it easier for you, then I want you to have it. So how are you feeling right now?"

"Really good," he said, his surprise bleeding into his voice.

"It's how it's supposed to be. On the physical side, shifting healed up the last of the injuries from the attack. Mentally, it's instinct to feel better when you get all your packmates in the same place like you did last night. That's when we're the strongest, and when the power really flows around us. And right now, your wolf is pretty close to the surface. When that happens, everything seems simpler somehow, even if it's definitely not easier."

"What do you mean?" Luke asked as he carefully rose to his feet between the two sleeping women so he could pull on the shorts Norman had offered.

"Wolf doesn't worry about a lot of things that humans flip out. If it doesn't have to do with keeping yourself fed, or the pack, or taking care of your mate, then it's not really an issue for the wolf. It's when you get away from here, and you start to really think human again that it gets a lot more complicated. It's normal, and I'm here when you need to talk."

"But for now, I vote for breakfast before more talk," Heather said, stretching as she got up.

"Dressed like that?" he said as Heather hugged both of the men.

"Nah. Remember we've got extra clothes in the car."

"Time to get Luke fed then. He did a lot of running last night," Norman said.

"What else did I do last night? I didn't do anything that would get me in trouble, did I?" he asked, feeling a brief flash of panic. He had woken up between two naked women, neither of which were Jenn.

"Nothing you'd regret, and nothing that would get you in trouble with Jenn. We wouldn't let you do anything like that. Just running and hunting and eating." Norman said as the three of them moved outside into the sunshine. Luke noticed that the ground was no longer muddy, but it was still damp.

"Officer Bates. Can I have a word with you?" A short balding man with glasses began to walk across the clearing towards them.

"Not right now, Irving," Norman said, stepping between Luke and the other wolf.

"Just because you're his sponsor doesn't mean you can decide who he does or doesn't talk to," Irving said, trying to draw himself taller in front of Norman.

"I said not right now," Norman said, a growl leaking into his voice, and letting just a little bit of his power push out toward Irving. "If you want to, you can call my house in a couple of days, and if Luke wants to talk, then he'll talk to you. But right now, he needs some space to sort everything out, and you need to get away from him so that can happen."

Norman took a few steps toward Irving, and the other man dropped his eyes to the ground and chose to make a tactical retreat.

"So what was that about?" Luke asked, watching as the man got far enough away to start up a conversation with another pair of wolves.

"Irving's a reporter. Likes to do big stories on the preternatural community in St. Louis, and isn't always careful about who gets hurt in the process. It would be a real coup for him to get an interview with Van Anders' only known surviving victim. As I told him , if you want to talk in a couple of days, then we'll set something up, but I didn't want him to ambush you today."

"Thanks. I've never done well with newspaper reporters." he said as they reached Heather's car.

"It's my responsibility to see to your emotional needs as well as your physical ones. Speaking of which, why don't you call Jenn and let her know how you're doing?" Norman said, reaching into the car, and pulling a cell phone out from under the seat.

"I'll do that," he said as he accepted the phone. He started to dial, and then paused. What was he supposed to say? About how he had woken up naked next to Heather and a woman whose name he didn't know? How was Jenn going to feel about that? How much did Jason's human wife know about her husband's habits when the moon ran full? And how was he supposed to explain how curling up next to an unclothed Norman seemed to tie into some deep need of the wolf?

"Everything okay?" Norman asked, concern on his face. "You're freezing up on me there."

"It's suddenly getting more complicated for me."

"Then call before I call her up for you."

"It's going to be okay. I could tell how much Jenn loves you, and how much she really wants to have your relationship work," Heather reassured.

He gave into their urging, and dialed the damned phone.

"Luke," she said, picking up the phone, for all the world sounding like she used to when he had come back home from a Mobile Reserve incident.

"Hey, Jenn-Jenn. How are you doing?"

"Much better now that I know you're safe. It was really good to be able to spend the evening with some of the other wives, but at the same time it made me worry more about you. They felt like they had to warn me that once in what's a great while these days, someone's husband or boyfriend doesn't come home from a full moon. Don't get me wrong. I want to know if it's a possibility for that to happen. But it made me start to worry about you all over again. So how are you, and what happened last night?"

"Physically, I think I'm really whole for the first time since the attack. Mentally, everything's a little weird right now, but Norman says that's perfectly normal. As for what happened, I guess it's like what happens when you black out from drinking too much or something like that. I remember meeting the pack leader and promising to follow the pack rules," he said, going with a version of last night that he could mention to someone who wasn't a wolf. "And then the next thing I remember is waking up with a dogpile of other wolves, kind of like how you see puppies sleep close together when they zonk out." There at least she would be getting a piece of the truth from him.

"Last night, they told me about how that kind of thing happens. They said that the good news was that you'd probably be cuddlier with me than you used to be. But the bad news was that you were also going to be cuddlier with everyone else than you used to be too, and that if our relationship was going to survive, then you had to be as honest as you could about what happened when you ran with the wolves and that I had to work on not being jealous about every time some other woman gave you a hug."

"So you're okay with me joining the dogpile?"

"I'm not sure about that. I mean it seems like all the wolves I've met are the beautiful people, and then there's me."

"And even though Norman would beg to differ, I still think you're better looking than any of them. When it comes to romantic love, you're my one and only. And I'm going to do my best to work with Norman and Sarah and the rest to make sure I don't screw that up. For all that I've come pretty far in life, I'm not sure how much it all would mean if I didn't have you to share it with you." To his surprise, he could feel the wolf in him agreeing with the human side of him. Both parts of him needed to have a mate.

"And I'm wanting to make it work too. Because I've thought about how it would be if there was a giant Luke-sized hole in my life, and that was a very sad place to be."

"Hey, enough of the sad places," Norman said, interrupting the two of them as he leaned toward the phone receiver. "Why don't you have Jenn meet us at the restaurant for breakfast. "Day after a full moon is supposed to be a happier place, and Cleo's definitely meets happy place criteria."

"Did you hear that?" Luke asked.

"Yes. Just tell me how to get there, and I'll be there as soon as I can be. Any place. Any time."

"Sounds good to me," he said as he passed the phone over so that Heather could give Jenn directions. Maybe it was just some sort of post-full moon hangover buzz, but he was starting to feel like he actually had made the right decision in signing up with Norman's crew after all.


	12. Chapter 12

It was weird. The further Luke got away from the lupanar grounds, the more he noticed just how different everything seemed to be now. It was when he was no longer surrounded by wolf that he was hammered by the smells of everything else, and he found himself submerged in a world of pavement, fertilizer, turtle wax, and the wonderfully subtle ways that Heather, Neal, and Norman smelled differently but all alike as she drove them to the restaurant. Part of him liked it, but the rest of him felt overwhelmed enough by the sensory overload that he found himself sliding across the back seat of the car until he was almost on Norman's lap as he sought contact with another wolf.

"Sorry," he mumbled reflexively as he realized he had pretty much jumped the other wolf.

"It's okay," Norman said, his hand running through Luke's hair as what had come to be usual. Luke found himself leaning into that comforting touch. "From the way your nostrils have been flaring, it's easy to tell you're having problems with sensory overload right now, and physical contact helps you get grounded enough to deal with it all. Reminds you that you've got a sense of touch to go along with your hyped up sense of smell and hearing."

"My hearing doesn't seem all that different," he said, enjoying the head rub.

"It's not as obvious as the change in your sense of smell, but you can pick up higher and lower frequencies than you used to, and you're also more sensitive to when something doesn't sound like it's supposed to. Which is a good thing when you're the one picking up on a car engine about to crap out on you, and I'm told a very bad thing when you're having to sit through your nephew's fifth grade band concert."

"Trust me, it's bad," Neal said from one of the front seats.

"So for now, just take some nice deep breaths, and work on remembering that just because you've got all this scent information swirling around you, it doesn't mean you've got to pay attention to it all the time. It's not too different from learning how to ignore someone you're forced to be in the same room with who just won't stop talking. Let yourself get caught up in paying attention to something you see, hear, or feel instead."

"I'll try," he said, deciding to focus on the sight of trees and farm fields passing by out of the window, as well as the feel of Norman's hand when it had slipped from his head to underneath his shirt so he could rub Luke's back. After a few minutes, the smells all around him let up to move from overwhelming to almost tolerable. "It's getting better," he finally said.

"Good timing," Norman said as they pulled into the restaurant parking lot.

"That's Jenn's car, isn't it?" Heather said from the driver's seat as she parked.

"Easy to pick out since Jenn's out in the sun leaning against the hood," he said, catching sight of her.

"Careful there," Norman said, holding on to him even as Heather and Neal started to get out of the car. "Human mates confuse the wolf at first. They smell and move like prey, but they're something that you have sex with, so they're not really prey. Crude as it sounds, the idea is to start thinking about sex with Jenn when you find yourself thinking of her as food."

"When I start thinking of her as food," he repeated.

"Yeah, because it is going to happen. It's just the wolf's nature, and not something to feel guilty about. What you need to do is keep focused on what she is in your life, and how you feel when you're with her. And over time, the right instincts kick in, and the wolf does come to recognize her as your mate automatically. The end result is that the person you're with is far safer if they're in a long term relationship with you than they are if you're a one night stand. And because we're romantics, Heather and I are going to do what we can to help you and Jenn stay in that long term relationship."

Norman's pep talk had taken long enough that Jenn had seen Heather's car and walked over to them. She politely greeted the rest of the wolves as Luke got out of the car.

"Luke," she said, his name becoming both a question and an affirmation of sorts.

She was the first human he had seen since he had Changed, and his wolf wasn't quite sure what to do with her. Norman was right. She smelled like both food and sex and laundry soap and just a little bit of fear. If the wolf could only tease that fear into something bigger, then the decision would be easy. But he wasn't supposed to let the wolf do that.

He answered her by wrapping her arms around her, his lips seeking out her own. The kiss was strong and rough, and somewhat unexpected. He could feel her briefly pull away before Heather firmly told her to respond the same way. So Jenn not only kissed back, but upped the stakes, biting his lip briefly, then sending her tongue to explore his mouth. Mate, the wolf confirmed. Mate and not prey. He stated to get aroused as Jenn's hands cupped around his butt. Then someone else's hand was on his back, and he felt a sharp sting of power jolt along his spine.

"I'd say for you kids to get a room, but not many of those kinds of rooms available around here," Norman said, his words deceptively mild as his hand stayed on his shoulder. But the message was clear to Luke at least; back off now, or Norman would make him back off in an unpleasant sort of way.

"Sorry," he said, easing back from Jenn but still holding her hand.

"Did I miss something there?" Jenn asked. "One minute it's like 'kiss him' and then you're all but pulling us apart."

"It's a matter of degrees. We want you two to have a strong and loving physical relationship with each other, and kissing is definitely a part of that. But we also don't want Luke to get so riled up that he loses control and shifts in the parking lot."

"So it's about that Eranthe stuff?" she said.

"For the most part." Norman said. "But if you have any more questions, could we hold off until after I get some food into me? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm just not good with answers before breakfast."

*****************

Brunch was an odd affair. Luke found himself wedged firmly between Norman and Neal in the restaurant booth, the close contact helping him keep the wolf in check to some degree, though he could definitely feel the wolf's confusion over whether the waitress or the plates she carried was supposed to be lunch. Between controlling the wolf, and working to keep the swirl of new scents and sounds from overwhelming him, he felt physically tired by the time Heather paid the check for the meal. As they left the restaurant, he gave Jenn a more chaste kiss, and let the other wolves herd him back to Heather's car.

He conked out on the couch and slept through the first half of the Rams game, then spent the rest of the day working with Norman as he learned the basics on how to control his beast. He never would have thought that it would have taken so much physical energy to manage to keep going through the breathing and mental exercises Norman put him through, but by the time the clock had barely gone past nine, he was exhausted enough that he could barely keep his eyes open. He stumbled up the stairs, and changed into a pair of boxers to sleep in before going into the shared bathroom to piss and brush his teeth. He may not get cavities anymore, but he didn't need people running away in panic every time he opened his mouth. He walked out of the bathroom and into the bedroom that smelled like home, digging under the covers in search of warmth. A few moments later he stretched one arm over his head, his hand brushing against Norman and Heather's headboard instead of the one for his own bed. A part of him noted that he was in the wrong bed, but the rest of him was so dead tired that he didn't have the energy to get up and move at that point. So with almost a sigh, he tucked that arm along the side of his body and let sleep claim him.

He woke up to the whine of a singer that was trying to pass himself off as a rock musician, and Norman's groans as the other man fumbled for the off button on the alarm clock.

"You have get up?" Heather mumbled from somewhere in the bed.

"Have to get up. The flip side of getting a light schedule the week before a full moon is that I get stuck working the morning commute shift the week after," Norman said, sounding surprisingly coherent for what the clock told them was five in the morning. With one more groan, he carefully extricated himself from his sleeping spot between Luke and Heather. Instinctively he moved along with Heather to fill the Norman-sized gap, and he found himself spooning around Heather while Neal, who apparently slept on his back, in turn shifted closer to Luke again. His hand grabbed fabric as it felt Heather's stomach. To his surprise, she seemed to be wearing a nightgown of some sort. It was odd since Norman had clearly been sleeping naked again and Heather tended to wear much less during the day.

"Cuz of Jenn," Heather offered as she snugged her shoulders against his chest. "I like her. She's trying hard to love you with your changes. Is hard for her to understand you sleeping s'mother naked woman every night, so I'm not gonna sleep with you naked."

"Thanks," he said, giving her a tummy pat. Now if he could only get Norman and Neal to keep their damn pants on at night.

So he was assuming that this was how it was going to go then, he thought as he heard Norman moving around in the bathroom doing whatever it was he did to look like he just stepped out of an American Eagle ad. It made him uneasy about how it felt so good to wake up surrounded by people he barely knew, and how natural it felt to give and take comfort from those same people. He had learned long ago that he couldn't trust his family or the people he grew up with. He figured he had been pretty much self-sufficient since he was nine. It had taken him a long time to feel like the camaraderie he had felt with the other police was not just an act. And even though he had felt a huge spark the first time he had gone on a date with Jenn, he had let that relationship build slowly on its own rather than trying to rush it. But with his relationship with the pack, the way everything seemed to slide neatly and comfortably into place in a way that was as easy and natural as breathing in a way that also freaked him. Make that easier than breathing, considering how hard it had been at times to follow Norman's breathing drills the day before. He didn't really like it, but he was learning just how much he needed them all, and it seemed like they were intent on giving him the tools that would let him be more comfortable and independent to some degree.

He inched himself closer to Heather as he took in the scent of her hair and shoulders. He decided to enjoy the moment for now, since he was going to spend the morning with Shang-Da, followed by more lessons from Heather, Neal, and Norman later. As he dozed, he found himself thinking of Jenn, and looking forward to the day when she was the one that he'd be waking up with in his arms instead. It was more than a pleasant fantasy, and he was a guy. By the time Norman was back in the bedroom to get dressed, he had gotten himself embarassingly aroused.

Pretend you are a Ken doll, or you're in danger of actually getting turned into a Ken doll, Norman had told him during one of his talks on shifter etiquette. He wanted to freeze or pull away from Heather, but that would be admitting he was actually feeling something going on. So he did his best to slowly relax and pretend nothing was happening as Norman stumbled around the room pulling on pants and socks. It was even a little amusing to see that the normally graceful Norman got a little bit clumsy when he had to get up at o'dark hundred.

"I'm off to work, love," Norman said, bending over to give Heather a gentle but thorough kiss.

"S'good on these days how you get home early," came her reply.

"Yeah, I should be home by about two thirty. Be ready to do some more work then," he said, turning his attention to Luke as he ran a hand along Luke's cheek.

"I'll be ready," he said. He had never been a person to mind hard work as long as there was a reason for it, and as far as he was concerned, working on controlling his wolf was definitely a good cause.

"And one more thing," Norman said, suddenly letting the magic bleed through his shielding as he slid his fingers down Luke's face until his fingernails pressed lightly against Luke's throat. "Call is a reminder to your wolf that it's going to do what I tell it to do, or what Heather or Shang-Da tells it to do. No negotiations. And no messing with Heather either."

The wolf inside was awake now, instinct driving Luke not to challenge the other man, but to submit to an alpha, to just give in to the other man's demands without a fight. Even if Norman was in the right, he didn't like just giving in right off the bat. But Norman was pack, and that was how it was supposed to be with pack.

"Understood," he said softly, the mix of emotions going through his head. He had always thought of himself as a strong person. Most men did. And strong people weren't supposed to let themselves get pushed around, no matter how much the wolf inside wanted to roll over and offer its throat to Norman. But part of being strong was always keeping your goals in sight, and not letting the little stuff along the way interfere in you reaching that goal. He'd put up with a lot of shit to get out of the trailer park. He could put up with a lot of shit in order to make it work with the wolves. But just because he was willing to tolerate it, and on whatever level the wolf worked on to accept it doesn't mean that the human side of him would ever really like that part of it all.


	13. Chapter 13

"Ready to go shooting?" Shang-Da asked as Luke slid into the passenger side of the cream-colored Lexus.

"Definitely. With all the weird going on, I'm ready to do something normal again." He leaned in to Shang-Da, rubbing cheek to cheek with the other man and drawing the scent from the other man. It was more than just the lectures on proper manners sinking in. The contact helped reassure the beast that he was still safely with pack even though he had left the comfortable den of Norman and Heather's house. He settled into the car's seat, clicked the seat belt around him, and found himself wanting to make contact with Shang-Da again.

But the other man was mostly covered up- white pinpoint buttondown shirt, and navy dress pants held up by a belt that looked like it cost a hundred bucks. At least he hadn't gone for the tie, which would have made Luke feel even more underdressed in his usual jeans and a black t-shirt. So with a sigh, he settled for sliding his hand over the other man's, hoping that it didn't seem as gay as it looked.

"Everyone has a rough time of it in the beginning," Shang-Da offered as he began to drive away from the house.

"That's what I keep hearing. I'm just really not good about needing other people. The last time that seemed to work out was when I was maybe about five."

"Norman said you weren't very close to your family."

"What else has he been saying about me?" Luke said, suddenly angry enough that he didn't mind pulling away from the other man. He hadn't directly asked Norman to keep what he had said about his family secret, but that didn't mean he wanted to be some sort of source of gossip for the pack either. He could feel the wolf start to rise up in response to that anger. Wolf saw it in simple terms; if someone hurt you, you hurt them back.

"Bring your beast back under control Luke. I can feel it rising up in you. Settle it back down now. Because if I have to stop the car and do it for you, you aren't going to like it," Shang-Da said, his hand wrapping around Luke's left arm. The trickle of power he let Luke feel let him know that he could be as rough or rougher than Norman could be. As instructed, Luke did his best to settle the wolf until it no longer seemed to want to override human thought. He wasn't sure how long it took, only that eventually it did happen.

"What did he say about me?" Luke repeated.

"He kept it vague. All he really said was that you had a fiancee you wanted to still try to make it work with, and a biological family you had good reason for cutting out of your life."

"And you know about this because?"

"Because although Norman's one of the guys who has stepped it up since Marcus died, he's still pretty new to acting as a sponsor. The first two people he sponsored, one of them was a voluntary infection because of catastrophic health issues, and the other one was infected accidentally during sex. Neither of them were easy jobs. Sponsoring never is. But they were both pretty straightforward cases compared to someone getting ripped up and surviving. So Norman asked Gwen and I for advice on how to help you build trust with the pack and to get you through your first couple of months intact."

"Okay. But if Norman's so inexperienced, why him instead of someone like you?" Shang-Da had been a cop at one time. He had more in common with Luke than Norman did, and clearly had the strength and control to handle a new wolf.

"Because when you sponsor someone, you've got to be able to be there for your wolf twenty-four seven for the first month or two, and my first responsibility in the pack is to protect Richard. You can't have two number one life responsibilities. One of them has to be subordinate to the other. Norman got the job because he was the alpha wolf who was in a position to start working with you when you were still in the hospital. The others we could have gotten on the visitors' list for secure isolation aren't strong enough to control someone with your police background when the wolf gets the upper hand. And Norman does have good instincts on the psychology side of it. He just needs to work on refining those instincts."

"I guess he seems to be doing a good job," Luke said.

"From our view, we're happy with how he's been working with you as well." Luke found himself wondering who the we were. Richard and Sylvie were in that group, but how many more? "We want every new wolf to be part of building a strong, healthy pack. You could end up being an important part. It's not often we get someone of your background coming into the pack. Thronos Rokke skews more toward accountants, construction workers, and strippers, and right now we need people who know how to handle themselves in a fight. We hope you'll end up being an asset to us."

And if he wasn't? Don't ask a question when you didn't want to know the answer. What had seemed like other options for his life were turning out to not be options at all. He couldn't imagine signing himself into a halfway house anymore, not when they stressed the need to isolate yourself from any other physical contact when the utter need for comfort from his own kind was so strong. He knew he couldn't just walk out of Norman's house and try to learn to control his beast on his own. He was going to make mistakes, and the risk of hurting or killing someone else was just too high. After everything, he was still one of the good guys, and the good guys didn't let that happen.

"I still hate how much I hate needing people I barely know," he said, words slipping out loud as he tried to work through his thoughts and feelings.

"It never goes away, but the need for so much physical contact becomes less urgent once you develop and strengthen the metaphysical bond you're already starting to build with your pack. Once you get to the point where your subconscious can tell your packmates are always close by, you don't feel that same sort of constant physical need."

"I'm not sure that really makes me feel any better." Bad enough to have ties of blood to people you didn't really like, but to be tied to five hundred other people in some other way you probably couldn't just walk away from was some other level.

"Just remember the rest of us have the same needs as well. It's not like those bad family or not quite loving relationships where it only flows one in one direction."

Luke found himself looking at Shang-Da's face as the other man pulled into the parking lot. For all his outward calm now, there had probably been a time when he had been newly infected where he had felt the same way. And it wasn't like Neal had to share a bed with Norman and Heather when the couch in the living room pulled out, and there was another small guest room in the house's basement. Or how no one had seemed in a particular hurry to get up and get moving again the night after the full moon. He hadn't really thought much about it before, but there was something reassuring about the idea that the other wolves might need him just like he so desperately needed them.

They got out of the car, and retrieved a pair of gun cases from the Lexus' trunk before heading toward the gun range. Just after they passed through the building's front door, Luke stopped sharply. The smells of metal and burned paper and gunpowder were what he expected, but the smell of the other he had not. It wasn't wolf; wasn't human; but it was far too much alive to be vampire even though there was a smell of earth to it.

"Morning, Bobby Lee," Shang-Da said as a man moved out of an office and walked toward them. He spoke with a Southern drawl, and looked human enough if you could ignore his scent.

"Beautiful day, isn't it?" Bobby Lee said, drawling out the words like he came from the South, and shaking Shang-Da's hand human-style before offering his own hand to Luke. "And you'd be Luke Bates then. Sorry to hear that you got pensioned from your job because of the attack."

Luke took Bobby Lee's hand, intending to mumble some polite nothing. But as skin connected with skin, he felt a spark of magic come from the other man even though it was something that he seemed to normally keep shielded away from notice. He found himself pulling Lee's hand to his nose in order to try to solve the puzzle, discovering the stronger smell of earth coming from palm and underneath fingernails. Lee wasn't an immediate threat. If he had been, Shang-Da wouldn't have greeted him as a friend. He started to close his eyes so he could better focus on the scent of the other man.

And then he realized just what he was doing, and quickly dropped Bobby Lee's hand.

"Sorry about that," he said, embarrassed at how the wolf inside him could bubble up to the surface so quickly.

"It happens when you're new," the man said with a shrug, unoffended by Luke's action.

"What are you?"

"Wererat," Bobby Lee said. "Part of the agreement between your lupa and my king involves sharing resources. The range and a couple more buildings in this industrial park are owned by the rats, and Shang-Da here comes by for shooting and coffee a couple times a month."

"Forget Starbucks. Sergio makes espresso like only an Italian properly can," Shang-Da said, a small smile on his face.

"You're welcome to have my share. I'll take a cup of good strong black from the diner instead any day." Lee said, returning the smile. The two sounded like friends who had had that same conversation many time before.

"After we're done. Can't have the caffeine making my hands shake now, can I?" Shang-Da said as he led Luke through a second door and into the range proper.

There was a comfortable sameness to the police shooting ranges Luke was used to right down to the hum of the ventilation system and identical warnings and lists of safety rules posted on the walls. Luke picked up his ear and eye protection from a rack by the door, draping the muffs around his neck by the head strap, and clipping the safety glasses to his tee. He looked down the shooting lanes, estimating that the safety berm was a good fifty meters back. For all that the building had looked like just another part of a crumbling industrial park, what was inside the building hadn't been cheap to build. He wondered just what the wererats did to get that kind of money, and why the local police had never really heard much about the rats.

Then Shang-Da opened his gun case, and Luke followed suit. The weapon was a Glock 23, the same one they used when he was police. It still slid comfortably into his hand as he examined and loaded it.

"Anything weird with the ammo?" he asked. With all the freaky magic shit you never knew.

"Just standard .40 Smith and Wesson. Consider yourself to be loaded for fae as well as bear."

"Fae as in fairies? I'm supposed to worry about a fairy invasion of St. Louis?"

"Don't sound so surprised," Bobby Lee said from the corner. "We haven't had problems with them in St. Louis while I've been here, but I've heard stories of them being total bastards elsewhere. And it is probably only a matter of time before we have to deal with them. I like Anita. I respect Jean-Claude. But between the two of them, well I'm impressed at how totally they're magnets for preternatural trouble. On that note, what targets do you two want to start with?"

"Give us person-shaped, and go ten meters out," Shang-Da said.

As Bobby Lee attached the targets to the overhead pulley system, Luke put his safety gear on, and gave the weapon one last inspection.

"We're hot. Understood?" Bobby Lee said. Luke and Shang-Da mumbled that they understood it.

From there, it was easy for Luke to slide back into his old comfort zone. The wolf seemed puzzled about why he would want to kill something from afar when teeth and claws were so much better, but he was focused enough on shooting that it seemed easier than usual to push its thoughts back away. After a first few shots to get a feel for the weapon, Luke found himself putting round after round into the kill zone. It was good to know the time in the hospital hadn't caused him to lose his touch.

They went through the ammunition that Shang-Da had brought, and as they began to pack up the handguns, Luke found himself disappointed.

"Hey, thanks for taking me out here today. First the hospital, and then the weird shit. It was nice to do something normal for an hour for a change."

"Y'all don't have to leave so soon. Anita said you trained as a sniper. If you'd like we can break out the rifles," Bobby Lee said.

"I'll pass, but if you want to stay, I'm in no rush to be anywhere today," Shang-Da said.

"Sounds good then," he said. Bobby Lee left the range briefly, returning with a Heckler & Koch rifle that wasn't generally available for civilian use in Missouri and a separate case for ammo.

"What targets?"

"Small bull's eye, thirty meters out ,and I'll go ten standing, ten kneeling, and ten prone." Might as well go easy with an unfamiliar weapon. Bobby Lee set up the targets as he carefully loaded the rifle.

"Hot, set, and ready when you are," came the confirmation.

Luke took a deep breath, letting it out slowly and evenly. Handguns, you didn't have to be so very careful about your aim. Hit anything in a six by six inch box on someone's chest, and they were going to go down on you. And you were usually shooting from close enough range that a little bit of a wiggle didn't matter so much. But once you talked about trying to hit an even smaller target at a longer distance, a lot more of the little things started to matter. You had to slow down your breathing because the movement of your chest muscles when you did breathe could nudge barrel just enough to change the angle of the shot in a bad way. You had to find perfect stillness no matter what was going on around you.

Breathe slowly. It really wasn't that different from what Norman had been trying to teach him to do during exercises to control his wolf the day before. He briefly wondered if finding that stillness again had been part of the point of Shang-Da bringing him out here. Then he pushed it aside to focus on the present, and he carefully squeezed off the first standing round. The bullet hit just to the top left of where he wanted it to go, so he adjusted, then finished off the rest of the standing shots.

Moving slowly and carefully, he worked his way down onto knees and belly as he finished the series of shots. He managed to only just barely hold off on his grin until Bobby Lee brought the targets in. For all that he wasn't allowed to do anymore, all that he couldn't do anymore, it was good to find something he still could do.

"Not bad there," Bobby Lee said as he examined the targets. It had taken him three shots to really figure out how to dial it in with the rifle. The remaining twenty-seven were a neat tight cluster.

"Scope's a little off, and I had to compensate," he said, trying to explain the first couple of off shots.

"Anita said she'd gotten reports you were good. The reports were right," Shang-Da said.

"I was supposed to go to Police and Fire State Games next spring in rifle. First time I ever would have gone to state since my high school football team sucked so badly."

"You played football. Why did you do that?" Shang-Da said. Something in his tone reminded Luke of the way Sylvie had questioned him earlier.

"Because it was fun. I mean if you hit someone in the cafeteria, you'd get suspended, but if you hit someone on the football field, people loved you for it. And people just love you when you're on the team. The gang kids leave you alone because they assume you're too tough to bother with. The teachers cut you all kinds of slack if you say you're having a hard time getting your homework in because of football practice. And the girls pay so much more attention to the football players than the geeks on the cross country team. It would have been stupid not to play."

"He puts the pieces together well, doesn't he?" Bobby Lee said.

"It's a good sign," Shang-Da said.

"A sign for what?" Luke asked as he looked over the rifle, rechecking it to make sure it wasn't loaded before passing it back to Bobby Lee.

"That you're going to be flexible enough to make it work in the pack." Shang-Da said as he patted Luke on the shoulder. "Lots of guys have problems picking up on the social cues of pack life in the beginning, and that causes them a lot of hurt."

"So what you're saying is that pack is kind of like high school cliques? I was really hoping to never have to deal with all that shit again. I mean spending six weeks as a high school resource officer while Michelle Whiteman was on maternity leave was bad enough."

"Not so much like high school, but more like knowing how to look and see you different groups interact and defer to each other. You're a smart guy. You're already doing a lot better at handling it than a lot of guys do."

"Guess I've got to take your word on it." Luke said as he moved away from the lane and replaced safety glasses and ear muffs in their places. As soon as the sense of calm from the shooting range wore off, he was going to feel all freaked out again. And if that was supposed to be doing well, he wondered just how bad it would be for someone described as handling it all poorly.


	14. Chapter 14

Luke tried to be quiet as he walked back from the bathroom into Norman and Heather's bedroom. There was no need to wake everyone else up in the middle of the night just because he had to take a piss. He slid into the bed, wrapping his arms around a girl wearing only gym shorts. Angie. Her name was Angie, and she was another one of Norman and Heather's friends. In the week since Neal had gone home to shiny new plumbing at his condo, Norman had been inviting other people from the pack to spend the night at their house. It was supposed to help Luke bond with the pack, and from what he could tell, it seemed to be working. Or at least the worst of the clinginess had passed. He still felt a strong need for physical contact with the other wolves, but it wasn't as bad as it had been. It was like he just knew they were there around him, and knowing they were there didn't make it feel like it was so urgent for him to press himself up against Norman or Heather right that moment. Not that he wasn't going to enjoy that kind of comfort though, if the chance came up, he found himself thinking as he rubbed his face through Angie's hair, enjoying the smell of pack and her shampoo as he did.

Just when he was about to drop back into sleep, someone's cell phone went off behind him.

"Hello?" he managed as he fumbled the phone up from the bedside table.

"Angie?" The voice on the other end was stressed and female.

"Just a sec," he said, passing the phone over to a now-awake Angie.

He couldn't quite make out what the other person was saying to Angie. But he could definitely feel the way Angie's body tensed up before the conversation went very long, and from the questions she asked, he quickly got a fairly good idea of what had happened.

"Who was it?" Norman asked from the other side of a now-awake Heather. He'd obviously figured it out as well.

"Aaron Connelly. He was on his way home from work, and got t-boned by a drunk driver. According to the fire department report, he was dead on the scene. One of us, and he still never had a chance," Angie said.

"He was a good guy," Norman said. "Could they get him out of the morgue yet?"

"Yeah, Grace said they already had him, and we're meeting in an hour out at the lupanar. She's making the phone calls right now to try to get as many people as she can out there."

"That's good. He deserves a good turnout. Seems like we should all go with you," Norman said.

"All of us? I can stay with Luke if the two of you want to go. I'm not sure Luke's ready for that yet," Heather said.

"Some things you're never going to be ready for, and you've just got to be thrown into the middle of it all," Norman said.

"Ready for what?" Luke said.

"Werewolf funeral," Norman said. "Now we don't want to cut it too close, so let's get moving."

Luke found himself quickly moving through the house, following Norman's instructions to put on clothes he wouldn't mind losing if he accidentally shifted. Just what was going on that the wolves were holding funerals in the middle of the night? When they got into the car, he found himself sharing the back seat with Angie, who had started to cry as she fastened her seatbelt. He cradled the woman as she leaned against her shoulders, feeling her tears eventually start to soak through his own shirt. For whatever reason, he had always handled other peoples' grief well. He had been told that he had done a good job of the sucky 'I'm sorry to tell you that there's been an accident' calls back when he was on the force, and Angie seemed to have found that same sort of comfort from him.

"Sorry about that," she mumbled as they turned off pavement, and onto what he recognized as the last part of the road to the lupanar.

"You were close to Aaron?" he said. Obviously she was to react like that, but it was a way to get her to open up and talk like she probably needed to.

"Even was in love with him for a while. It didn't work out, but we stayed friends. And if you hadn't guessed, turned out I still really cared about him," she said as she started to wipe her face with a corner of her own shirt.

"It's never easy to lose someone," he offered.

"Yeah. We've all lost friends in the last couple of years, and every time, it's still like a punch in the stomach. And if he'd died because of pack business, it would have been one thing, but to survive everything he did, and get taken out by a drunk driver just isn't fair."

"Drunk drivers are scum of the earth," he said as Norman pulled the car off the road and into a parking spot. There weren't as many vehicles as there had been for the full moon, but it was still a good crowd to be rounded up on about an hour's notice at, he blinked at the dashboard clock, three in the morning.

"You hanging in there?" Heather asked Angie as they got out of the car.

"Best as I can. Small mercy is that at least he died here instead of on one of his trips to Memphis or Kansas City."

How that counted as a small mercy, Luke wasn't quite sure. But he did notice that they had switched off partners as they walked past the old farm. Heather was now holding Angie's hand, and Norman had his arm tight around Luke's shoulders. It was how Norman tended to grab onto Luke when he wasn't quite sure how Luke was going to react to something, and sent up another red flag.

"So what aren't you telling me here?" he asked as he put his feet into the dirt and pulled Norman to a stop.

"What do you mean?" Norman said, waving Heather and Angie toward the candle-lit pathway that led through the woods to the lupanar grounds.

"Usually, you've been all chatty about what you've felt like I needed to know, and tonight you've been all quiet. I mean even though Angie spent the whole trip here crying, I thought you would have said a something on the way over, if only because I'm sure there's some new set of rules about manners for werewolf funerals like there seems to be for everything else."

"There are some things I just can't get you ready for beforehand, that you've just got to get thrown into the experience, and this is definitely one of them." Norman paused as he tried to figure out what to say next. A group of people passed them where they stood, the others touching the stopped men's faces and hands, or offering pats on the back for reassurance and comfort. "And this also falls in the category of things that the humans can never know about because they just can't really understand it. You talk about what you see here to a human, and not only are you dead, but whoever you tell is either dead or infected because we've got to contain our secrets. It's that sort of serious."

"What am I getting myself into here?" And from the tone Norman had taken, Luke found himself wanting to ask if he could go back and wait in the car. But he doubted Norman would go for that considering how insistent he had been that Luke had to be there.

"Something that, for whatever it looks like to outsiders, is sacred to the lukoi. Now I know we've worked hard in the past week to build up your shields, and to learn how to keep the wolf part of you from bleeding too much into the human side of you. Time for you to let those shields drop again, and for you to feel the night around you."

Because there was something out there that would spook him if he was thinking too human, Luke guessed. But there wasn't much else he could do at that point other than do as Norman said. Besides, the human part of him thought, the last thing that Angie and Aaron's friends needed was some stranger causing a fuss at the funeral of someone they obviously cared deeply about. He was here, and he had to do his best to show respect for the dead.

He took a deep breath, and let down the walls in his mind and the shields around his body. The forest felt different than it had on the night of the full moon. Before it had been beautiful, but distant, and something among the trees had been almost ready to challenge his right to be there. Now it felt like it was welcoming him home in some weird way, the sense of welcoming mixed with an undercurrent of sadness. Maybe the sadness had to do with another man who wasn't going to come home again.

"Like that?" he asked, the smell of the woods and of Norman making him feel more settled, for all that the human part of his brain was still convinced that what was up ahead was probably a bad idea.

"It's a good first step. Time to get walking again though. And don't try to block off the wolf again until it's all over."

With that cryptic command, Norman started to walk forward again, and Luke let him lead him along the path. As they made the turn into the clearing, he heard the first of the howls. For an instant, he tensed up, wanting to bolt away from the sound of a beast on the hunt, but then he relaxed when he realized that the howl was not because of anger or hunger, but was filled with sorrow.

"Easy there," Norman said. "We just need to pay our respects to Polly for a second, and then we'll go back to the edges of it all."

As they walked toward a lanky, fair-haired woman clutching a bible who stood near the stone throne, Luke took the opportunity to look around the clearing. Aaron's body lay just downwind of Polly, the naked form placed on top of a blanket. The old cop part of him noted that so that was how they looked under their clothes after the traffic wreck. The bad accidents he had responded to had always involved blood-drenched fabric by the time he got there.

He followed Norman's lead in offering Polly condolences, and then greeting Richard and Sylvie, who stood to one side of Polly. As Norman had promised, they retreated to the edges of the crowd after that, and as they walked through the clearing, Luke started to recognize familiar faces in the crowd. Jamil and Shang-Da were both there, as were Neal, Teddy, Laura, Gwen, Jason, and a couple more who he knew more by scent than by name at that point. As they walked, Luke let his fingers brush up against the bodies of others, and leaned into other hands that pressed up against him. For all that there was a dead man in the middle of them, the feel of people, of what he was beginning to discover were his people, made him feel warm and alive and far away from his own grave.

"Is anyone still on the trail?" Sylvie asked. A few people mumbled negatives, so she continued. "Then it's time to start. Richard?"

"It's a sign of how much Aaron was respected that all of you have come here today. And he was a strong and brave man who would gladly stand up to both Marcus and Raina if he felt like it was a good cause, no matter how much the personal cost would be to him. We are fortunate that we were able to bring him back home today. He will bring his strength, courage, and character to the munin. Polly?"

"Um. I'm really not good at this, but thanks for coming here. I still can't believe what happened, and I'm grateful you're here to make sure Aaron Connelly isn't going to be forgotten. I guess it's time then, Richard?" she said.

"I defer to the one who was Aaron's mate," Richard said.

"My thanks, Ulfric" Polly said, as she set the bible on the throne. "If you could leave the face, please. I don't want to remember him like that."

As Luke tried to figure out what she meant by that, Polly kneeled on the blanket next to her lover's body, kissing him gently on each cheek, and on his mouth. She slid back just a little bit, her hair falling forward to cover up exactly what she was doing, but Luke could puzzle out that she kissed Aaron on each shoulder blade as well. Then she bent down just a little bit more as the wind shifted. Luke couldn't see what she did next, but he could hear her teeth tear open the skin on Aaron's arm. And then the smell hit Luke. Meat. What little peace he had felt earlier vanished and tried to block the wolf's thoughts and impulses out even as he tried to wrestle out of Norman's grip. The wolf wanted to go forward and be next to Polly as she took a mouthful of her man. The human part of him wanted to quash all that, to make a run for the car and get as far away from the nightmare and from himself as he could.

"No, don't pull yourself away. Not now," Norman ordered as Luke felt the magic pulse between them.

"You don't understand."

"I do. We all do," Norman said, his grip on Luke growing stronger. "I told you before that we draw strength and wisdom from the members of the pack that have come before us. This is how we do that."

Part of him wanted to yell out that what they were doing was wrong, that Polly was defiling Aaron's body and his memory with what she was doing. But the part of him that could feel the forest around him, could feel the spirits that surrounded the lupanar kept just enough doubt in his mind that he couldn't do that. The spirits were certainly capable of making their feelings known. He had felt them tag him as an outsider before Richard had welcomed him to the lupanar.

So he did nothing for the moment other than watch the scene near Aaron's body. Polly finished her taste of Aaron and rolled to her feet, wiping her mouth as she did. She was followed by Richard, then Sylvie. Luke had to close his eyes at that point because he just couldn't watch the wolves consume Aaron's body anymore. The smell of it, of food and meat, was bad enough. It repulsed him at the same time he was drawn toward it. He didn't understand it, and wanted nothing more than to run. He was just worried that if he tried to move, he would find himself going toward Aaron's body rather than away from it. The only he could really do at that point was to stay put and hold onto Norman tightly. Norman wouldn't let anything bad happen to him, he thought, as he tried to narrow his focus so he only felt Norman's warmth and smelled Norman's skin rather than anything beyond that.

He didn't know how long they stood there together. He only knew Norman betrayed him by taking that first step toward Aaron.

"Time to go," Norman said gently as he gave him a tug.

Luke followed Norman blindly, his eyes still firmly closed as they walked across the clearing together. They got very close to Aaron, and a tug at Luke's shoulder pushed him downward. He had to open his eyes at that point to keep from landing on something he shouldn't as he went to his knees next to Norman's body. What he saw was a mix of skin and flesh and muscle and bone, and he felt both his excitement and repulsion spike at the same time.

"Eat so that he's always remembered," a voice said from behind him.

Norman pushed his shoulders down so that Luke's face was next to what had been Aaron's thigh. The smell of food overwhelmed Luke at that point, and he found himself leaning even closer to the meat.

And then the world went black for him amid the candlelight.

**********************

It was touch and smell that brought him back again. First it was the hand that had pushed up his t-shirt so that it could rub circles on his back. Then it was the familiar smell of Heather, the person who went with that hand. He made a small happy sound for the back rub as his vision came back into focus, then looked around to see that he was back by the barn and the parking lot. To the right of him under a light pole, a group of wolves, talked quietly as they sipped from cans of beer. From their words, it seemed like an impromptu wake.

Aaron's wake.

As much as he could remember of the lupanar flared back up in his mind. He groaned, and tried to push himself away from Heather. With what had happened, how could she be sitting there next to him giving him a massage?

"Easy there. Take it easy," she said, her arm moving to wrap around his waist. "I take it the black out is over, and you're starting to remember?"

"Yeah."

"Well you've got a lot to process right now, and this probably isn't the right place for it. Norman had to go talk to Shang-Da for a minute. Why don't you hit the bathroom to clean up, and I'll get him and Angie, and we can go home."

She was right. He didn't want to be there anymore, no matter how much the whole place seemed to want to slide something under his skin that made him feel welcome.

"I remember where it is, if you want to go find those two," he said, pushing himself to his feet.

She let him go, and started to walk away from the barn, presumably toward Norman. Luke booked for the bathroom, any bathroom, as quickly as he could, ending up in a small singleton of a room that had its own sink and toilet, rather than the more communal one down the hall. Clean up, Heather had said. He briefly looked down at his dirty hands, feeling queasy at the thought of what kind of gore was on his fingers and stuck under his fingernails. Then, trying not to sully the tap, he turned the water on and grabbed for the soap, scrubbing away at his hands until they went pink.

He looked down into the basin, watching the little bits of Aaron swirl into the drain. His hands were clean but it just wasn't enough because he could still taste it in his mouth. He knew what had to have happened after everything went blank on him. He cupped his hands, and drew water up to his face, first trying to wash around his lips, then trying desperately to rinse it our of his mouth. But it still wasn't enough because of what he knew was inside of him. He turned off the faucet, and kneeled on the cool tile facing the toilet. If a thirteen year old bulimic girl could figure it out, then it shouldn't be too hard, he thought as he opened his mouth and stuck his index finger down his throat.

An eternity of gagging and dry heaving later, he found himself thinking that it was harder than it looked. For all his effort, he still hadn't managed to bring anything solid or liquid back up. He pulled himself back into a standing position, and dug through the medicine cabinet in hopes that there was something that he could use to induce vomiting, but he had no luck finding anything like that.

There was probably a message in that. No matter how hard he tried, what had happened that night couldn't just be washed or flushed away. He had eaten someone. And no matter how much he would have liked to be able to claim he was under the influence at the time, he was still accountable for his own actions that night.

He stumbled out of the bathroom, and back outside just in time to see Norman grab a can of beer from the wake group. As Norman popped the top of the can, Luke felt a spike of anger. Norman wasn't going to get to wash the taste away that easily.

Luke charged across the clearing, his right hand forming a fist that he drove into Norman's stomach. There was surprise on Norman's face at the blow, and he wavered, but instead of going down, he held steady just enough that he could reach around and crumple the beer can into Luke's head. There was a sharp pain on Luke's temple, and the smell of blood and Heineken followed a few moments later. As he took a few more swings at Norman, he felt his beast rising in him with a mix of anger and confusion. He wanted to fight, but he was fighting someone he wasn't supposed to fight. Taking a deep breath, he tried to push the wolf back down inside him. If he had been able to do that earlier, hadn't listened to Norman's request to let it out, then it never would have happened to him.

Norman used Luke's momentary distraction to make his move, sweeping Luke's feet out from under him. Luke managed to roll as he fell, quickly scrambling to hands and knees but before he could get up again, Norman moved fast enough to be a blur. He stepped around Luke, wrapping an arm around Luke's neck and putting him into a choke hold, in the process, pushing Luke far enough forward that his hands were past his ribs. With that kind of angle, Luke couldn't use his arms to push himself up anymore. For a split second, he found himself wondering why a scrawny civilian could keep getting the best of him. He tried to buck Norman off him, but Norman had wrapped a leg around him to keep himself close.

"Down!" Norman demanded as he started to cut Luke's supply of air off. Luke's control slipped for an instant, and the wolf took advantage of it to swarm back up in his mind. Run, fight, or submit surged through his brain. He had to do something before he passed out because if he went out cold, the others would eat him. He wasn't going to let that happen, not tonight. Shift and run, the wolf urged. Four legs were faster than two. But he wasn't going to let the wolf have control of him again, not tonight. There wasn't anything more he could do to fight Luke, not before he ran out of air.

He stopped trying to push himself up with his hands and knees, and let himself fall forward until his chest hit the ground.Norman jerked his arm against Luke's throat briefly, then eased up on that pressure as he landed the rest of his body on top of Luke's.

"It doesn't matter who or what you used to be. In this pack, you don't go taking a swing at an alpha that's agreed to protect you. Understand?"

"I understand," Luke managed to rasp. Now that he could breathe again he was starting to notice just how much his head hurt where the beer can had hit.

Norman pulled Luke's neck to one side, and grabbed the neck of Luke's shirt and pulled it the other way, exposing a line of skin from his ear to his shoulder. He tried to relax, to go limp to show Norman he wasn't going to try anything else, but his muscles still tensed up as he felt Norman's breath on his skin.

Norman bit him hard, this time until Luke could feel the blood seep from his shoulder, the smell of it mixing with the beer and blood from the first wound. For all that the wolf in him had been frantic earlier, it was calm now. His submission had been accepted, so there wasn't a need to run or fight anymore.

They lay there together for a few minutes, Luke feeling the worst of the anger bleeding away from him as his breath returned to normal. He stuck his tongue out, tasting the blood running down his head and cheek. It made him feel better. If he was still bleeding, he wasn't dead, and they weren't going to eat him too.

"Ready to sit up now?" Norman said.

"Yeah, and I promise to behave."

The two men rolled into a seated position and moved a few feet back so that their backs were against the barn. Luke looked across the clearing to see the wake group had moved a few feet further down, but was otherwise continuing their remembrance of Aaron. Either they were good at ignoring the fight that had just happened in front of them, or they were good at hiding that they had paid attention to the fight.

"Heather was right. I shouldn't have been here tonight. Just when I thought I was getting a handle on all this shit, you haul me out here, give me a push, and when I'm thinking straight again, I discover I've become a cannibal." He did his best to keep his body language properly polite, but he couldn't keep the anger and pain from his voice.

"It's part of who and what we are," Norman said. He reached over to Luke's bloody shoulder, ran his fingers over the wound, then licked the blood off his fingers in order to prove hit point. "And you may be pissed at me now, but in the long run it's better this way. If you'd stayed behind tonight, you would have heard how we honor our dead before too long anyways, and you would have jumped to all kinds of wrong conclusions. Here tonight, that was the truth of it. Be mad at me all you want, but you can't tell me that at least a part of you felt right about what you saw and participated in."

"Honor the dead? Yeah right."

"You feel the munin, felt them even before you shifted for the first time. Do you think that kind of power would tolerate disrespect?"

"Did they have a choice?" Suddenly, an even worse thought hit him. "You know as bad as I've felt with this all sometimes, at least I knew that if I died along the way, then the horror would be over. But it isn't. Even in death, you can't get away from it."

"If you're asking about souls, they still go to wherever it was they were supposed to go after you die. I'm no expert on metaphysics, but Anita is, and that's what she says about the munin. It's more like, bad analogy time here, you know how they say you're always supposed to back up your computer files, so you save a bunch of stuff onto a floppy disc or one of those jump drives?"

"Yeah."

"For us, it's like you're leaving behind the jump drive when you go. There's a copy of what was important to you that stays here: your strengths, your passions, your talents. For all that it's easy to hate certain other wolves or even certain entire leadership groups, in the end, the pack is far more than whoever at the ulfric is at any one time, and you want to leave it the best inheritance you can so it will still be strong when you're gone."

"You sound like you've thought about it a lot," Luke said. He still felt freaked at what had happened, but if there was some way for Norman to help explain how he had felt in the clearing, then he wanter to listen.

"When it got really bad a couple years ago, Neal, and Heather and me, and a couple others even had it all figured out which trees we wanted what was left of us to be buried under," Norman said, his face oddly peaceful as Luke snuck a look at him.

"So you're okay with, with other people eating you?" At least the bleeding on his head seemed to be starting to stop, he thought as he wiped away a line of blood that had gone toward his eyebrows.

"Gotta hope it would bring strength to my friends and confusion to my enemies and the pack's enemies. If you think about it, what's normal in America, the whole pump your body full of chemicals and then dump you in a concrete box, that's probably the least natural thing you could do to my body."

There was a certain logic to it all as long as you ignored the whole part about your friends eating away your flesh.

"So what does Heather tell your family if you die?" he asked, thinking of the police funerals he had been to over the years. Family, friends, and fellow officers overwhelmed the pews of every church he had been in. Anything less would have been disrespecting a brother.

"That I'm gone, and that the pack held a small private funeral shortly after my death. If I die, my will says my body goes to the St. Louis Natural Burial Society as soon as possible, and without autopsy. The Burial Society's been around since the Great Depression and got started because too many people back then couldn't afford a big church burial. Plenty of humans use them too if they don't want a fuss. We've got someone in the county offices who can write up a death certificate if you need that to cash in on an insurance policy."

He wondered if the pack expected him to change his will in the same way, and if so, how much time he had before he was expected to do so. He had to admit that there was something to how he had felt and in Norman's words. But it was a place he definitely wasn't ready to go yet.

"Is there anyone who doesn't get taken out into the woods after they die?"

"Once in a while, we get a pack member who was just too high profile to die in any sort of quiet way. If Marcus had died outside of the lupanar instead of during a fight for dominance, we probably would have let the human world take care of services, no matter how much some people would have bitched. As it was, there was a mad scramble to make it look like he flaked out and moved to Mexico on a whim to live with a former secretary. Not fun to try to convince the cops that there wasn't foul play.

And in rare occasions, we will turn up our noses at people we felt didn't act and work for the best interests of the pack. Again, it's very rare, and it ranks as a huge insult. That person is seen as too flawed or too corrupt to be able to offer guidance to the living members of the pack."

Norman was persuasive in his own way, and if Luke let the wolf bubble up to the surface, he could just about understand what Norman was saying. And that was the part that made him nervous. He remembered being forced to read 1984 in high school, and remembered the way that bad guys in the book had been able to twist around words and emotions until black was supposed to be white. And it wasn't like Norman had actively lied to him about anything, but he was the one in charge of making sure that Luke knew what the company line was.

"Well for now, consider me to be both too flawed and too high profile for that kind of shit. For now at least, I've still got too many friends on the force who check up on me and would notice if I was gone. Can't be bringing RPIT into pack business."

"That would definitely be a bad idea for now." Norman said. Luke got the impression that he expected other things from Luke down the road, but wasn't going to press the point with the rookie that night. "But don't think you're going to be able to avoid the deaths of others as some sort of package deal. I'm not going to let you be disrespectful in that sort of way."

He couldn't disobey Norman. That had been part of the message Norman had gotten across tonight. And he knew that if he had to, he could let the wolf out just enough for the person that followed Aaron. He just had to be willing to give up a small piece of his soul in the process, and that part of his soul definitely got tied into the lupanar. Which in its own way seemed to be trying to seduce him. The comfort of the pack wasn't a hollow phrase, and at that moment, it seemed like it was trying to lure him away from what was left of his humanity.

But what else was he supposed to do?

"Corny as it sounds, you take it one day at a time," Norman said. Luke hadn't realized he had spoken out loud. "Same like you do with everything involving pack life. Sometimes, the theory seems really out there, but when you get used to the reality of it, and discover the reasons for it, you discover it really is quite different. Now, let's get you cleaned up again. I've got the morning shift at work, and we've got to get you home before that."

Norman hugged him as he pulled Luke to his feet. And for all that he was still not entirely happy with Norman, Luke found himself reluctant to end the embrace and head back to the bathrooms. But in the interests of Norman getting to work on time, he made his way back to the bathrooms alone, taking comfort in Norman's scent on him as well as the blood and beer. In the end, he couldn't think that Norman was an evil person, not when he had seen so much true evil in the world. And if Norman and Heather and Neal and the others had managed to come to terms with this part of pack life and kept their consciences intact, then maybe there was a way he could manage that too.


	15. Chapter 15

It was another Monday, which meant another trip to the range with Shang-Da. They had both worked their way through both handguns and rifles before coffee, and Shang-Da was almost regretfully packing the gun cases in his car trunk as Luke sat in the passenger seat checking his phone messages.

"Anything interesting?" Shang-Da asked as he slid into the driver's seat.

"A message from the admin back at the police station. Felisha sounded all sorry about it and all, but she still couldn't change that I've got ten days to come into the station and clear out my old work locker or they'll mail everything in it back to my house. Department's getting a new group of rookies coming in, and with the whole increase the size of the department initiative they're going through right now, they can't afford to waste the space on someone who's not coming back."

"It happens," Shang-Da said, starting the engine and easing the Lexus onto the industrial park access road. "Everyone else's life goes on even when your own is changing in ways you wouldn't have imagined. Any thoughts on if you want to go clear everything out yourself, or if you just want to wait for the package in the mail?"

"I'd rather go over there. Maybe some sort of closure or that kind of shit." And maybe a little part of him still expected everything to be unchanged if he did walk back into the station. He normally wasn't the one for fantasies, but that one never seemed to want to go away. Going back there would hopefully resolve something in his mind.

"Do you want to hit there before lunch then? Nothing else I've got going on until two today."

"I don't want you to have to go out of the way."

"It's no problem. Today will be easier for you than a couple of days from now when you really start feeling the full moon. And Richard's orders are that no wolf voluntarily walking into a police building goes in alone because we want to make sure the police don't try to claim something happened when it didn't. I figure I blend in better there than Norman would."

"With those feet, San Francisco boy, I don't think so," Luke said, teasing the other man about his Italian-made loafers. "Maybe out in California, you can get away with playing fashion plate, but in this town, those sure as hell aren't the shoes of a St. Louis cop, even one who's pulling in the big money for shift commander."

"Maybe they should give them a try. They're far more comfortable to wear for a twelve hour shift than something cheaper would be. Sometimes you've just got to be willing to pay for quality," Shang-Da said.

He pointed the car toward downtown, and Luke found himself getting more and more antsy as the miles went by. When he had first met Sylvie, she had asked him where his loyalties were, and he was starting to get a strong answer to that question. He was headed back to the place that he had worked out of when he had sworn to uphold the laws of the United States and the state of Missouri. He was probably going to end up talking to cops he had worked with for years while he was there. And when it came down to it, he knew where a lot of bodies were buried, many off them tied to open cases or missing persons reports, and he wasn't going to say a damn thing about them to anyone at the station.

It just didn't seem like the right thing to do anymore. If he said anything about the deaths of the people buried in the woods being anything other than natural, well that was only his word on the matter, and none of the rest of the wolves would confirm his story. And all he really had anyway were secondhand reports and implications that Richard had killed Marcus, Anita Blake was somehow responsible for Raina's death, and that Sylvie had gone over a pile of bodies to get her position in the pack. The only way to get any physical evidence of a crime would to be to take a Bobcat to the woods, and Luke's gut reaction to that idea was that it would be horribly horribly wrong. The munin did what they could to aid and protect the pack. To haul their bones away from what was supposed to be their final safe resting place was a metaphysical crime in its own right. You just didn't disrupt the dead like that.

And then there was the matter of what would happen to him if he talked. Even if he managed to stay one step ahead of a pack that would clearly try to kill him for the betrayal, his life after that would look pretty bleak. If he asked for protective custody, he was looking at a probably permanent stay in a halfway house. If he tried to run, the other packs would try to kill him as well instead of offering him a place. Even if he had better control of his beast already, he had no desire to try to live as a lone wolf. He was coming to accept that he needed people like Norman and Heather and Shang-Da in his life, needed them and valued them as friends as well. And he just couldn't betray his friends because of some sort of human standards that fundamentally didn't mesh with the beast inside him and what he had become.

It was amazing how much a person's opinions could quietly change without them even realizing just how much they were changing. It was a melancholy realization, and he found himself sighing as he reached to rub his hand across Shang-Da's arm for comfort.

"Are you okay?"

"No great moment of depression with the idea that I'm never going to get to go back to work if that's what you're wondering. It's more realizing just how much of a different person I am than I was the day I walked out the door to help take down Van Anders. And how Norman and you guys set it up so that a lot of it just kind of sneaks up on you. If Norman had told me back at the beginning that I'd get to a point where I can tolerate slipping another guy tongue and even like curling up next to his naked self when I've only got shorts on, I would have asked him how much weed it took to get a werewolf stoned enough to say that. And right after that, I would have been on my guard to do everything I could to keep shit like that from happening. It's easy to stand up and say 'No' to something when you're presented with that kind of big giant 'Luke, I'm your father. Come join the Dark Side.' moment. But instead it's a little step here, another step there, and then you don't even realize just how far you've walked away from humanity until you have that moment when you realize how much the scenery has changed."

"Which is why most packs these try to go with the slower and subtle route for introducing someone to our world if the circumstances allow it. We're so different than the humans in some ways that you've got to work up to the hard part of the process rather than risk breaking someone or setting them up for failure when the moon rises," Shang-Da said as he turned down increasingly familiar streets.

"I can understand that, especially if you're talking about other people or in the abstract or something like that. It's just that when you realize it's happening to yourself, and you find yourself wondering why you weren't smart enough to see it and fight harder, you know?"

"Because you're smart enough to know when not to fight. The beast is something you've got to work with in order for both of you to survive it."

"I know. I'm just hoping I'm smart enough that I'll manage to figure out how to feel like I'm the one in control of my own life again, instead of being just reacting to all this other shit."

"The time's coming soon where you'll get most of that," Shang-Da said as he worked the Lexus into a spot in the visitor's parking lot. "You're making good progress."

"Doesn't feel like it," Luke grumbled, as Shang-Da reached over to run his fingers through Luke's hair. He leaned into the touch, focusing on it instead of the stink of the city around him.

"Are you ready to do this?" Shang-Da said, changing the subject after a few seconds.

"Ready as I'll ever be."

"Good. I just want to warn you now that a place like this can cause the wolf to try to come to the surface," Shang-Da said as they got out of the car and began to walk toward the station.

Luke started to ask him why, but a few more steps made it all blatantly obvious. The entire station reeked of fear and agression and a half dozen other very strong emotions. He felt the wolf's reaction to the rush of smells. For the moment, it was confused. The fear that should have meant that there was food inside there ripe for the taking was so strong that he wasn't sure if he was supposed to go charging in there to roll in the wonderful scent of it, or if he was supposed to take it as a warning and run as far away from it as he could. He shook his head, trying to clear his nose of it all as he first came to a stop, then took a pair of careful steps back.

There was the feel of fabric being pulled away from his back, and for a split second the wolf confused that with something trying to pull his skin away from him. Then he felt Shang-Da's steady hand press against the small of his back. He took another breath, trying his best to focus on the smell of the other wolf instead of the stench of the police station. It worked, and he felt himself steady. He was with pack, and pack working together was strong enough to handle whatever had caused the smell of fear inside the building.

"Thanks," he said softly as he started to walk toward the front door again, even as he still leaned back into Shang-Da's touch.

"It's a little bit different here than learning how to go into an ordinary diner or gas station with humans inside," Shang-Da replied.

A bit further down the sidewalk, Luke could see a man and a woman walking towards them. Thankfully, they weren't going away from them. If they had been, Luke would have taken it as a sign that they were prey that could be chased down. Instead, the man glared in disgust at the two of them as he grabbed the hand of the woman, who in turn smelled just a little bit like sex. Luke had a brief moment of realization about how him and Shang-Da must look to outsiders, but right now the most important thing was to take what Shang-Da offered and use it to keep the wolf under control.

Shrugging off the looks he had gotten, he walked through the public entrance to the station, doing his best to keep his focus on Shang-Da instead of on every other person in the station. They walked across the small lobby, and Luke stopped at the clerk's counter placed behind thick slabs of bulletproof glass, recognizing the man perched on a stool there looking over a visitor's list.

"Hey, Conyers," he said, looking over the short blonde cop who was apparently still on desk duty after rotator cuff surgery.

"Bates, why did you have to come back here?" Luke was surprised at how hostile the tone was from the other man.

"Felisha Edwards called, and said I needed to clear my stuff out of the locker room."

"What, they couldn't just mail it to you?"

"There's some stuff I wanted to get now instead of waiting for the Fedex guy," he said. It seemed like an easier explanation than the truth.

"And who's he?" Conyers said, waving at where Shang-Da stood just beyond Luke's shoulder, his hands to his sides for now.

"The guy who offered to help me clean out my crap."

"Is that all?"

"That's all," Luke said, doing his best to think on his feet of an explanation that didn't involve the idea that Shang-Da was there to keep him from eating anyone. "I'm sure you heard at least part of what happened to me. I got gutted deep enough that it involved sliced up intestine. Do you think any competent doctor would be letting me lift up anything heavier than a key ring so soon after that happened?"

He hadn't technically lied to Conyers, and it should have been enough to get Shang-Da allowed in along with him, but Conyers wasn't buying it.

"Like everyone here doesn't know what really happened to you. And it's bad enough that I've got to let you back inside. I'm not going to let one of your new friends in along with you."

"Yes, you are, Conyers, wasn't it?" A somewhat familiar voice came from behind Luke. He looked back and recognized Lt. Zebrowski from the spook squad standing in the lobby.

"Lieutenant," Conyers started. "We don't need his kind charging all around in here."

"His kind being a decorated officer who was wounded badly enough in the line of duty that he is no longer able to perform his job?" Zebrowski said, the tone of his voice indicating that Conyers was not going to win this argument.

"His kind being, shit, sir I'm not going to be responsible for him running around in the station doing God knows what."

"Feel free to call Bates and his friend there my problem then," Zebrowski said, hovering over Conyers as the officer filled out the correct paperwork.

With a pang of regret, Luke took the pair of visitor's badges from a slot at the clerk's desk. This wasn't supposed to be a place where he was only a visitor. He passed one of them to Shang-Da, and clipped the other one to his t-shirt as Conyers buzzed the three men back into the main part of the station. The stink of fear and the rest was even stronger, but Luke was starting to almost get used to it.

"Thanks for the help, sir," Luke said as the door closed behind them.

"I'm glad I could do something. Everything you've gone through, you don't deserve that kind of treatment from someone who's supposed to be on your side," Zebrowski said. He gave Luke a pat on the shoulder that lingered just a little bit long for human, and then waded into the chaos that was the main part of the squad room.

"Which way now?" Shang-Da asked, interrupting Luke's view of the people moving from place to place.

"Basement," Luke said, turning left to head toward the stairway. "We've got locker rooms, a range, and a small gym down there."

They walked down into the basement, the smell of mold starting to replace the smell of human found on the surface levels of the station. As long as he'd been a cop, there had been a problem with leaking pipes in the building, and the drywall seemed to have suffered the most because of that. He led Shang-Da through two more unlabeled doorways before finally coming to a room filled with several rows of full-sized lockers.

"I've gotta take a leak a minute. Coffee's gone all the way through me," he said, walking through the maze and toward the showers and toilets area. There were other smells there, some expected and some unexpected. One guy alone in the shower, yeah, but a couple of guys who had clearly been together there... Luke shook his head and went to take care of business, not wanting to be distracted too much by the sexual habits of his former coworkers.

"I didn't think to ask if you needed a bag or a box or something," Shang-Da said as he returned.

"I've got a small duffle bag down at the bottom of the pile. Hopefully everything fits," Luke said as he opened up his storage space and started to dig for the bag. For a moment he wondered if it was all worth it, as everything in the locker now decidedly reeked of sweat and mold. But Heather had some laundry soaps back at the house that seemed to take the stink out of everything, and he was never the one to waste perfectly good clothes. "I do have to say I'm not going to miss having to keep an extra pair of uniform pants and another pair of jeans at work just in case some drunk barfs on me in the middle of a shift."

"That's why I went for detective back when. Easier to let the uniforms deal with the worst of the incompetents and incontinents."

Duffle found, he started to shovel clothing into the bag. He bumped something metallic on a hook as he pulled a windbreaker off another hook, the bad lighting of the room still picking up on the shiny chain. Unthinkingly, he reached to grab it as well, and was rewarded with a burning pain across his palm.

"Shit, I forgot about that," he managed, quickly pulling his hand away from the offending chain and wrapping it in the windbreaker instead.

"Forgot about what?" Shang-Da said with concern.

"Silver cross on a silver chain. We wore them most of the time no matter what their lawyers said. If a perp ever bitched about it, the union lawyers were going to raise a big stink about violating our religious freedom by not letting us wear a cross underneath our shirts. I had another one on when, on that day. I guess it got lost somewhere because I never got it back from the hospital."

As he started to shove windbreaker and painful object deep into the bag, he heard the door to the locker room open again, and smelled two women, one that smelled of old bad blood, as they began to walk through the room.

"Officer Meyer's locker is right over here," the first woman said. She was an officer he didn't quite recognize, and the one who was on the rag. The second woman he clearly recognized: Ryshelle Meyer, wife of Officer Trey Meyer.

"Hello, Ryshelle," he said, feeling a pang of guilt over how little he had thought of Trey since the attack.

"Luke, it's good to see you," she said, politely lying to his face.

"I'm sorry I couldn't make it to the funeral," he said.

"Considering how many different tubes you had sticking out of yourself at the time, it's understandable. Jenn sent over a card and a fruit basket from both of you. I heard you were out of the hospital now."

He could see how hard it was for her to see him here, seemingly intact and perfectly healthy when she had a husband she had put into the ground.

"Out of the hospital yeah, but I'll never be what I was, and that's why I'm here clearing out my locker too."

"That's what I heard. Trey got the vaccine, you know. Not that it would have mattered for him from what the paramedics said."

He wasn't sure why she had felt like she had to say that, or how she expected him to react.

"I don't really remember much of that night outside the pain," he said, what he did remember of that night coming back hard enough that he found himself leaning into Shang-Da to keep the wolf from trying to jump out of him.

"I'm sorry to remind you of that," Ryshelle said softly and truthfully. "It's just sometimes I wonder if he's still be here if he hadn't, if he could have survived like you did."

"There are so many ifs about that night. Maybe he would have, I don't know."

"And we can't live our lives letting the what-ifs control us, can we?" she said, sadness in her voice.

"I'm not the person to do that."

"Me either. So how is Jenn doing? I haven't seen her since a couple of days after the funeral."

"She's doing as well as you could expect. On one hand, she's glad I'm not doing traffic stops anymore, but from how I survived the attack, it puts some stress between us."

It wasn't enough to drive them apart, but it was always there. He wanted to let Ryshelle know that both he and Jenn had paid their own prices or his survival.

"Hope the two of you can still make it work. It always seemed the two of you were good for each other."

No longer wanting to talk, Ryshelle turned away from him at the point and began to gather up Trey's belongings. Luke went back to work on his own space, suddenly wanting to get out of the room as soon as possible.

He finished up, and they made their way back upstairs, Luke moving through the building with confidence the best he could. This had been his space or many years, and he was going to leave it with a bit of dignity, not with the impression that he was being shoved out the door, no matter how much a few of the other officers he saw seemed to want to do that to him. Shang-Da carried his bag for him as he walked back into the public lobby, and both of them caught the unexpected scent mixed with fear and a hint of fresh air as Luke moved to return the visitor's badges.

"Conyers," he said, dropping his voice until it was almost a whisper as he slid the badges back into the slot.

"I've got nothing else to say to you."

"At least listen then. You see the dude in the chairs on the far side of the wall there," he said waving toward where a surly looking teenager in a leather jacket sat. "You see he's even more of an idiot than you are. Kid's carrying crack in his pocket when he's waiting at a police station. I don't know why. Just that he's dumb. Call for a dog to do a sweep, get him to signal, and you've got yourself a nice bust while you're stuck back here. Your call, but I definitely would."

Before Conyers could say anything in return, he turned away from the counter and walked with Shang-Da out the door, and back into the sun and stench of the city.


End file.
